The best books about Antarctica

This book dissects Tasmania, an island state of Australia, to reveal hybrid geology, diverse scenery, and exotic inherited origins. Its parental rocks once abutted North America and Antarctica in the Precambrian Super Continents Nuna and Rodinia. They split away and collided with the Paleozoic Super Continent, Gondwana. There they shared mountain building and mineralizing events with Australia. When Gondwana began to split, vast sheets of molten dolerite rock invaded across South Africa and Antarctica to enter Tasmania and buttress its highlands.

A remnant of Gondwana, carved by rivers, seas, and ice and host basaltic lavas, it is called a geological paradise. The author’s masterly explanations of its geology, superb photography of wilderness, highlands, coasts, rocks, and minerals, and clear diagrams, all combine in a mind-opening publication.  

Great Circle tells the story of Marian Graves who, born in 1914, falls in love with flight at a young age and, despite difficult circumstances, is determined to chart her own course in life as one of the world’s earliest female aviators.

I loved Marian’s passion for planes and flying and her determination to circumnavigate the world by flying over the North and South Poles. It’s an epic novel, which weaves in the present-day story of actor, Hadley Baxter who is cast to play Marian in a film about her disappearance in Antarctica.

I thoroughly enjoyed following the lives of the two very driven, liberated, and adventurous women, and was particularly fascinated—sometimes gobsmacked—by the history of female aviation. 

A fast-paced, action-adventure tale for young readers. 10-year-old Pearly is concerned after receiving a strange phone call from her parents. They belong to a top-secret group. She believes her parents are being held on a ship bound for Antarctica but realises that they are not there, and she becomes the one in trouble. How will this young adventurer solve what is happening? It's something to do with a great hairy beast that is believed to dwell in the icy landscape-a creature her parents would have liked to prove exists. Whilst Pearl is a worrier, she steps into the frame and exhibits newfound bravery and nerve, doing what she can to find her parents. An encouraging example to be brave in difficult circumstances.

Rule #1: Writers should write what they know. Many science fiction readers know Isaac Asimov as a prolific genre author. First and foremost, however, he is a scientist, a biochemist by training. In this book, Isaac and Janet Asimov share essays on diverse scientific subjects from life on earth to discoveries in space. For me, I searched the book for everything from the fate of the dinosaurs to the height of sea-level rise in case of a major melt-down of Antarctica and Greenland. 

In this book, imagination runs a parallel reality. It is a place where a writer or a reader will see a jumping-off place from the real world to dystopia. 

The near-savant brilliance of Charles Wilkes, captain of the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-1842), is prominently tee’d up here by Philbrick (one of our greatest writers of lesser-known nautical history), as is his jealous, petty, venal and stubborn mindset which ultimately was his undoing.

Also the primary reason you’ve never really heard of this remarkable scientific voyage that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean and even named the newly discovered Antarctic continent. I was surprised to learn the Exploring Expedition was much more ambitious than the overland Lewis and Clark trek, scooped up infinitely more specimens of natural history and scientific data – but was nearly completely forgotten in our history books.

Philbrick untangles the perils and personalities to help us understand why. 

There is no book that better captures the unique human culture present at modern Antarctic research stations than the late Nicholas Johnson’s Big Dead Place, a frank, funny as hell, and at times savage chronicle of a year working support at McMurdo Station. Like my sister, who winter-overed at South Pole Station, Johnson worked in the galley, but it was the bureaucratic nonsense, present even at the farthest reaches of human civilization, that caught his incomparable eye for absurdity.

As I wrote South Pole Station, Johnson’s wry, searingly intelligent voice was always in my mind. To me, he is the epitome of the non-scientist drawn to the world’s most unforgiving workplace: a wry, brilliant journeyman whose humor had a razor-sharp edge but who cared deeply for the work he did and the people with whom he did it. This is my favorite book about Antarctica.

If you can’t decide which of the many long stories of polar expeditions to read, this one is for you!

This book is a selection from the stories of the famous Arctic explorers: John Franklin, Roald Asmussen, Fridtjof Nansen. If you flip the book around and turn it upside down, you get a selection of Antarctic explorers of the same caliber, which is a brilliant design. 

In an amazing feat of leadership and critical decision-making under the most stressful circumstances imaginable, Ernest Shackleton managed to save his entire crew – despite their ship being crushed in the ice pack of Antarctica. His decisions from start to finish risked everything – hiking to the edge of the sea, sailing one of the ship’s small boats on a voyage to a distant outpost, bringing help back, and saving the crew. His decisions inspired me in the many expeditions I led as a naval officer, none of which were as challenging as what he faced.

Hapgood was a lecturer who used the bright young minds of some of his graduate students to make a detailed study of a pre-Columbian map drawn in 1513 by a Turkish Admiral by the name of Pirie Re’is. Rei’is had drawn his map using source maps made by Alexander the Great and even earlier peoples. It is of the Atlantic showing the Americas correctly drawn and placed. There is an ice-free Antarctica where the correct outline of the coast of Queen Maude land is less than 7 miles out of place. Hapgood’s similar analysis of other maps shows that there had been a global civilization on this planet sometime in the past.

Author Susan Solomon is a senior scientist with the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. She has uncovered what I believe is the real reason why Scott’s party couldn’t stagger back to safety. In the polar regions, the reason is always the climate. Even if you prepare carefully and well, sometimes it’s just too cold for human life. Scott and four companions were fighting an unbeatable foe, and they knew it. They died gallantly anyway, which is why a hundred years later we haven’t forgotten them. Solomon’s book came out in 2001, and she brings the tools of modern climate science to bear on Scott’s fate.

This is a book for older readers who love action and adventure. All of Dan Smith’s books are dynamic and engrossing stories, but as I’ve always been drawn to colder climates, I think this is my favourite. The breathless action takes place at Outpost Zero in Antarctica where secrets and all kinds of new technology are discovered. 

I’m a huge film fan and could definitely imagine this as a big-screen blockbuster. But be warned: be prepared for thrills and chills!

To take a break from his day job as Professor Emeritus of Higher Mathematics at Caltech, Eric Temple Bell (John Taine was his pen name) wrote a series of science fiction novels that dealt, not with mathematics, but largely with biology. Any of these are still quite readable today, and notable for their discussion of biology and related fields when most writers of science fiction were focused on physics and space travel.

The Greatest Adventure deals with mutated dinosaurs in Antarctica, which sounds like something out of a 1950s horror film but which Bell uses as the basis for an investigation into science and not schlock. I suspect he utilized the pen name John Taine so as not to embarrass his supercilious colleagues in the math department (or possibly himself).

If you like books about epic expeditions, along the lines of Shackleton's Endurance, when the grand explorers of the early twentieth century had yet to reach the most remote regions of the world—books filled with more danger than fiction authors could imagine for a plot—tales of endless grit and survival—then you’ll love Alone on the Ice.

Combining his mountaineering expertise with his writing talent, author David Roberts brings you along with Douglas Mawson and his entire crew on the most incredible polar expedition, a complex story that involves sub-stories about other explorers and expeditions. (Mawson was a crew member on one of Shackleton’s early expeditions who almost reached the South Pole.) Unpacking the details takes a little time, but once you get acquainted with all these incredible people, you won’t put the book down. We modern adventure-seekers have a lot to learn from these pioneers. 

A gripping story… show more.

This book is the best and most accessible touchstone for Lovecraft’s particular brand of cosmic horror and, certainly, the sheer madness he exposes us to by the end of the book is something to behold.

But where it really shines is in the opening chapters, where it at first seems like this is to be a simple Arctic expedition. The isolation and bleakness of the setting combine perfectly with the unknown to make some of the most ambitious ideas in all horror become fiercely believable and all the more terrifying for it. 

This book was the basis for the movie The Thing, which I love—the first movie, not the remake.

To me, this book is just an awesome setting for a monster tale. Researchers in the Antarctic trapped with a thawed-out alien creature? I mean, come on! That’s everything I want in a book. It’s a quick read, but it’s truly phenomenal… and frightening.

The long titular story from Peninsula Sinking is about three phases in a young man’s life, and his maturation from a guy who does crazy stunts to get attention from the cool kids to someone who, full of regrets and hopes, grapples with highly evolved intellectual and ethical conundrums and finds safety only in love. Its final third opens with this enticement: “Imagine it’s you facing the loss of the still-ripening cherries between your legs.” Throughout the book, Huebert proves himself a wizard with figurative, sensual writing, layering bizarre images with tricky turns of phrase. We are reminded that “there were palm trees on Antarctica once.” Anything can happen.

This collection is filled with great energy, stunning images, and overall great stories—all of them prominently featuring non-human animals, and their interactions with humans, in some cases tackling complex ethical dilemmas with considerable insight.

Another book about seafarers with deep business lessons.

Lansing’s riveting account of Ernest Shackleton and his wayward crew teaches much about when and how to “pivot.”

W. Brian Arthur wrote, “Entrepreneurship in advanced technology, is not merely a matter of decision-making; it is a matter of imposing cognitive order on situations that are repeatedly ill-defined.”

Few situations in history were as “ill-defined” as the one the Endurance and its crew encountered, and the story highlights how Shackleton maintained discipline, loyalty, motivation, and perseverance among his crew as they “pivoted” to a radically different strategy and planned under intense pressure and with minimal resources.

Basically, a classic true-life startup parable.

A gumbo of meat (often penguin), fat (typically blubber), and maybe some crushed-up biscuits, “hoosh” is the catch-all term used for meals of desperation cooked up and choked down by different historical expeditions, and it’s an apt title for Jason C. Anthony’s engaging and unique look at a slice of Antarctic living. Forget Shackleton’s heroics—what did he eat? How did early explorers survive on penguin eggs? Exactly how desperate does one have to be to eat seal brains? Why is baking at South Pole Station so difficult? Why was the Russian base Vostok stocked with so much vodka? (A question that probably answers itself.)

Anthony is a support staff veteran who has done a number of stints at various research stations on the seventh continent, and his wry narration—which weaves historical accounts with his own experiences—is great fun to read. I only encountered this book after South Pole Station was… show more.

Lynne Cox is one of the world’s most extraordinary distance swimmers, and she’s also a remarkable writer. In this, her first book, she writes about her emotional connection to water, her spiritual need to swim, as well as recounting the many challenges she faced in her successful crossing of the Bering Strait – not the least of which was the 38F water temperature. I was truly honored when Lynne agreed to write a testimonial for my book.

I found this novel, a kind of elegy for Antarctica, completely transporting. I was swept up in the immensity of the glaciers, the cold and danger, the intensity of life lived so apart from the rest of the world.

The story is about several kinds of love – a romance between a female field researcher and another worker, love for the emperor and Adélie penguins she studies, and most of all, love for this imperiled continent in which most of the action takes place. I was completely captivated by the love story and the penguins, and my heart was in my mouth when the novel builds toward a disaster at sea amid dangerous calving icebergs.

The scenes in this stunning landscape are truly breathtaking. This is a truly unforgettable book, one that makes the strongest case for saving our planet than any I’ve read. I enjoyed learning about Antarctica, scientific… show more.