There’s so much more to the Arctic than tundra, explorers and pseudoscience.
Credit: Lucas Jackson/Reuters/Alamy, a 1967 radio documentary by pianist Glenn Gould, a series of interwoven voices muse on travels in the Canadian Arctic. To the clickety-clack of train wheels rolling over tracks, the speakers ruminate on solitude, shattered illusions, the improbability of future “gigantic plastic bubbles surrounding Arctic villages with a cloak of warm air”, and what Gould calls an “incredible tapestry of tundra and taiga”.
Where the north begins depends on the eye of the beholder. The volcanic, ice-covered Bouvet Island is claimed by Norway, but lies in the north “only from the perspective of the South Pole”, Brunner writes. Located between South Africa and Antarctica, it is a 49-square-kilometre nature reserve dominated by seals, along with penguins and other seabirds.
For Europeans of antiquity, “the North was a phantasmagoric dark spot beyond the border of the Greco-Roman universe”, Brunner explains. In the fourth century, Greek astronomer Pytheas of Massalia claimed he had discovered the legendary far-north island of Ultima Thule, later identified as Iceland, Greenland or the Faroe Islands, among other places.
Ultima Thule was also the nickname of a distant object in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune — 6.5 billion kilometres from Earth — explored in 2019 by NASA’s New Horizons craft. It was eventually renamed Arrokoth, meaning ‘sky’ in the Powhatan/Algonquian language spoken by Native Americans of the Chesapeake Bay region, after it was pointed out that ‘Ultima Thule’ had been co-opted in the nineteenth century to refer to the mythological homeland of the supposed Aryan people.
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