A White Polar Summer A White Polar Summer
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The Antarctic. Photo by M S/Unsplash
Nature, Outer Space

A White Polar Summer

The Antarctic Sun
Mikołaj Golachowski
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time 13 minutes

We naturally associate the Sun with the tropics. Columbus even believed that these regions are closer to it, and imagined the Earth as an enormous female breast, with its erect nipple somewhere around equatorial South America—which is why it’s so warm there. But the Sun’s influence is nowhere so dramatic as in the coldest areas: on the poles and in their surrounding regions.

I’m not a fan of Columbus, to put it mildly. Yes, he did once get spectacularly lost in the Atlantic and America’s Indigenous inhabitants had to help him out. In retrospect they probably wish they hadn’t, considering the bloody way in which he repaid them. In any case, he thought he’d reached the Indies because he drastically underestimated the size of our planet, even though at the time all the data on the subject already existed. Today we know that he certainly wasn’t the first European to reach America: the Normans arrived there five hundred years earlier. But they didn’t discover it either, because it’s impossible to discover a continent that has been inhabited by masses of people for thousands of years. Just as they didn’t discover France when they visited it as Vikings. It’s worth remembering that a Viking is just a Norman at work—the word doesn’t describe nationality, but a profession of fairly energetic exploration. A Viking is a very active tourist from a thousand years ago, immensely interested in artifacts of material culture, especially the smaller ones—a bit like the representatives of the British Museum a few hundred years later.

But let’s go back to C

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Since childhood I’ve been of the opinion that I should have been born about 150 years earlier than I eventually managed to be. I would have found myself smack bang in the middle of the most interesting era for naturalists. Had it happened exactly 150 years earlier, I’d have been two years older than Alfred Russel Wallace, a year older than Gregor Mendel, and 12 years older than Benedykt Dybowski. Darwin would have been 12 years my senior, and Alexander von Humboldt, 52 years older. So, at least in terms of period, I would have been in perfect company. Of course, these fantasies are based on the tenuous assumption that I would have been able to receive a proper education back then. As far as I know, my family is descended from various strata of society, but none of them especially affluent, so there’s every chance that I would have been more of a Janko the Musician (only without the talent), or some other Oliver Twist.

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