Booklets | Selection 2 | Guenter G. Rodewald | Consultant

The book II
The Antarctic continent constitutes a unique natural laboratory for studying and
understanding the natural history of our planet and gaining some idea of the
serious environmental risks we are beginning to face.
This great expanse of sea, rock and ice in continual movement, where the mean
temperature does not usually exceed zero degrees centigrade and that remained in
virgin state up to the beginning of the last century, has for thousands of years been
exercising a decisive regulating role on the global climate of the planet and serving
as a home for prodigious life-forms that we are only just beginning to find out
about.
Many scientists worldwide have taken advantage of a tacit race on the part of
various countries to participate in the development of sciences as multifarious as
glaciology, the physical oceanography of its currents, the effects of accelerated
climate change, the taxonomy of countless new species and the complex and
unknown ecology of organisms that depend on ice for their survival.
The biologist Sergio Rossi was called to participate in three polar research
campaigns (the last in 2011), on board the German ice-breaker vessel Polarstern,
the finest in the world.
This book is the fruit of that exciting experience. In it, the author undertakes a
detailed examination of fundamental issues related with the white continent:
survival in such an extreme climate, the formation of the ozone hole, the effects of
climate change on the organisms that inhabit its waters, the ecological
deterioration caused by the permanent bases set up there, and the possibility (and
dangers) of economic exploitation of the vast resources of all kinds that are
concealed in the Antarctic.
Having always been fascinated by these singular landscapes, Sergio Rossi also
reconstructs some of the episodes that have marked the exploration of these
territories, such as the dramatic race between Amundsen and Scott to conquer the
South Pole, and Captain Shackleton’s odyssey to save his crew from certain death.
The book leads us on an entertaining overview of all the problems and
opportunities that the planet’s most forgotten continent offers us. A remote mass
of ice upon which our future as a species depends and which we cannot continue to
ignore for much any longer.