JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE EARTH

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE EARTH

EARLY this year, I found myself aboard a Russian research vessel-the Akademik Shokalskiy-heading towards the coldes, driest, windiest continent in the world: Antarction. My journey began from 13.09 degrees north of the Equator in Madras. and at least as many ecospheres.

By the time I actually set foot on the Antarctic continent I had been travelling over 100 hours in combination of a car, an aero-plane and ship; so my first emotion on facing Antarctica's  expansive white landscape and uninterrupted blue horizon was a relief, followed up with an immediate and profound wonder. Wonder at its immensity, its isolation, but mainly at how there could ever  have been a time when India and Antarctica were parts of the same landmass.

Six hundred and fifty-million years ago, a giant amalgamated southern supercontinent-Gondwana-did indeed exist, centered roughly around the present-day Antarctica. Things were quite different then: humans hadn't arrived on the global scene, and the climate was much warmer, hosting a huge variety of flora and fauna. For 500 million years Gondwana thrived, but around the time when the dinosaurs were wiped out and the age of the mammals got under way, the landmass was forced to separate into countries, shaping the globe much as we know it today.

To visit Antarctica now is to be a part of that history; to get a grasp of where we've come from and where we could possibly be heading. It's to understand the significance of Cordilleran folds and pre-Cambrian granite shields; ozone and carbon; evolution and extinction. When you think about all that can happen in a million  years, it can get pretty mind-boggling. Imagine: India pushing northwards, jamming against Asia to buckle its crust and form the Himalayas; South America drifting off to join North America, opening up the Drake Passage to create a cold circumpolar current, keeping Antarctica frigid, desolate, and at the bottom of the world.

For a sun-worshipping South Indian like myself, two weeks in a place where 90 percent of the Earth's total ice volumes are stored is a chilling prospect (not just for circulatory and metabolic functions, but also for the imagination). It's like walking into a giant ping-pong ball devoid of any human markers-no trees, billboards, buildings. You lose all earthly sense of perspective and time here. The visual scale ranges from the microscopic to the mighty: midges and mites to blue whales and icebergs as big as countries (the largest recorded was the size of Belgium ). Days go on and on in surreal 24-hour austral summer light, and a ubiquitous silence,

interrupted only by the occasional avalanche or calving ice sheet, consecrates the place, It's an immersion that will force you to place yourself in the context of the earth's geological history. And for humans, the prognosis isn't good.