Adrian Howkins. The Polar Regions

Like all polar explorers, Adrian Howkins has had to weigh up the risk/reward equation in bringing his project to fruition. The risks of undertaking a book such as this were quite considerable. Where a more conventional approach would have clung to the coattails of straightforward chronology, Howkins has abandoned these well-known coordinates, and leapt into the whirlpool of what is potentially a chaos of borderless and formless subject matter. No one can be sure where the Arctic or Antarctic begins and ends, as the summer and winter cryosphere of each contracts and expands seasonally. Moreover, the borders of both northern and southern regions are themselves relatively indeterminate—porous and political, contested and constructed. This gives a chimeric intangibility to the physical boundedness of the study that could easily have resulted in an amorphous and shapeless historical account. The risks are amplified by Howkins’s additional aim of showing the interconnection between the two regions.

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