Ice. Ice Is. Ice Is Nice.

Earlier this year I returned to Christchurch, New Zealand, completing the last bits of research for The Entire Earth and Sky. When I am in town there, my colleagues at Gateway Antarctica let me work in one of their offices. The final chapter of the book had been reserved for information on global climate change and I wanted to hear what the scientists in New Zealand thought of the latest round of reports -- more change happening more quickly than expected appeared to be the headline. Or was it?

While I had worked at Gateway over 15 months in 2003-04, each of the scientists working alongside me had been exquisitely generous with what they understood of the continent, based on both their field research there and their wide readings in the literature. I actually found the scientists far better readers and far more curious about the ideas behind The Entire Earth and Sky -- how we place ourselves into a landscape, how we understand place through story, how the Antarctic is all about fantasy and desire -- than any of the English professors I came across at Canterbury.

If you are curious about Antarctica, a continent that is basically a cold desert, check out the excellent online guide, which the Gateway scientists have charmingly named a "visitor's introduction to Antarctica and its environment."

At any rate, I kept putting off writing about climate ideas, because each week seemed to bring something important over the transom: the IPCC, more rapid melting, penguins marooned due to too much big ice. My head spun. Thus, on an early autumn day I found myself sitting in Prof. Bryan Storey's office, listening to his ideas on global climate change, while staring at the photo on his wall of Shackleton's Endurance trapped in the ice.

With Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize, I cast my mind back to Storey's words. He spoke in his serious, resolute, calm manner, it is amazing that humans have effected the planet so, that we have altered the system with our "little fires" and cars. We have changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Now we see that the Earth-system science approach is the only approach for studying and understanding climate. Now we see that if you mess with one part, it all changes. Nothing happens in isolation.

Storey added, but because of very complicated feedback mechanisms, while we are certain we have altered the system we cannot say what effect that will have on climate.

That is, the only word that seemed entirely true: Change. The film "The Day After Tomorrow," he said, was actually not that far fetched.

Sometimes people ask me about Antarctic research, and because Antarctica for many is synonymous with melting ice these days, they also ask me about climate change. Sometimes I tell them what Prof. Storey said earlier this year.

In America, one of the most common comments after this story, unbelievably, is the pronouncement that the listener either drives a Prius or is thinking of buying one. Maybe, people tell me, when Toyota comes out with the new model in 2008 I will get one.

Yikes. Maybe we should all watch The Day After Tomorrow Again. And again. Maybe art will make the Earth seem more real in its change.