Ice is the beginning and ice is the end of Antarctica.
To enter Greater Antarctica is to be drawn into a maelstrom of ice. Antarctica contains 90% of the planet's glacial ice, and during the winter when the seas around it congeal into a frozen pack, the size of the Antarctic ice field doubles. Antarctica is literally fused together, as a continent, by ice. The magnitude of the Antarctic ice sheet is enough to deform the planet. The scale of its ice field affects global climate. The dimensions of Antarctica ice control the level of the world ocean. Antarctica - The Ice - is the Earth's sink for heat and water, a cold fusion that absorbs rather than emanates, a geophysical underworld.
The Ice is organized, like Dante's Inferno, into concentric rings. There is a gradient to the terranes - loose, information-rich, dynamic on the perimeter; fixed, information-poor, invariant at the core. To journey to its source region is to pass through an increasingly ice-dominated landscape until land itself vanishes into exclusionary ice. The reductionism of The Ice is relentless. Ice replaces everything that is not ice. Ice confines ice. Ice defines ice. A continent is reduced to a single mineral. In Antarctica more is less.
It is a subworld, Antarctica, not readily visited or understood. This antipodal vortex does not draw but repels. Leave the coast and there is nothing to live off, nothing to drink, nothing - according to traditional esthetic standards - to appreciate. Travel is opposed not so much by active resistance as by a fantastic passivity that leaches away all that is essential to sustain life and thought. The albedo of The Ice reflects information as much as light. A journey to the interior is an act of defiance, a quest pursued in opposition to the natural order, a white whale amid the world's continents. Such a journey moves beyond wilderness; beyond life; beyond Nature as Other. Here Nature becomes Negation. To encounter the pure icescape of the source regions is to peer into a white darkness.
The ice acts in peculiar ways on scenes and consciousness. It is at once a sink, a reducer, and a mirror. In small doses, it accents. By removing clutter it can even amplify a scene's message. But when it becomes exclusive, it becomes self-reflexive. It removes all processes and presences other than its own. It is profoundly passive: it takes rather than gives. The quintessential Antarctic experience is of voids; of things and processes missing; of experiences, sights, sounds, movements, figures, and colors not there. There is no sustaining biota. There is no indigenous culture by which to transfer knowledge or appreciation. There is no obvious moral order, only a terrible solipsism that substitutes soliloquys for dialogues. The Ice replaces everything that is not ice. Ice illuminates without enlightening.
Intuitively one expects that big places will be filled with many things - objects, images, events, information. But The Ice offers only the purity of bigness. In this Ice sink there is no just proportion between what is expended and what is received. The Ice will take all it can, indifferent to nuances of feeling or purpose. What it cannot claim outright it will reduce, then reflect back whatever residue remains, an ice vortex at whose distant bottom lies a mirror.
How to illuminate this white darkness? At best, passage to The Ice can become a kind of esthetic fast that leads to a state of trance from which come new visions. At worst, it results in an intellectual and emotional whiteout. The self dissolves into the self-reference of The Ice. Mostly, people compromise by not allowing ice to control the scene, by seeking out the margins where ice interacts with sky, sea, earth, and life, by not committing themselves to the exclusiveness of The Ice. In this way ice becomes one feature or one process among many, shaping and framing but never dominating. It is one thing to abstract from life, another to live in abstraction.
But at the source these ploys are not possible. Here, on the polar plateau, there is no cultural geodesy by which to triangulate from the known and the familiar. The coherence of things thins. The enormity and purity of The Ice erodes away esthetic handholds, polishing the surface into a radiant, terrible reflection. Space becomes vanishingly small, time pauses in frozen hesitation, and the mind disconnects from its referents.
Only The Ice remains.