Antarctic Quotes & Sayings

Life is fragile: it thrives only in a narrow range of temperatures between freezing and boiling. How lucky that our planet is just the right distance from the sun: a little farther, and the death of the perpetual Antarctic winter - or worse - would prevail; a little closer, and the surface would truly fry anything that touched it. — Leonard Susskind

[In Adelie Land, Antarctica, a howling river of] wind, 50 miles wide, blows off the plateau, month in and month out, at an average velocity of 50 m.p.h. As a source of power this compares favorably with 6,000 tons of water falling every second over Niagara Falls. I will not further anticipate some H. G. Wells of the future who will ring the antarctic with power-producing windmills; but the winds of the Antarctic have to be felt to be believed, and nothing is quite impossible to physicists and engineers. — Frank Debenham

The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins. — Neal Stephenson

I have come to the conclusion that life in the Antarctic Regions can be very pleasant. — Robert Falcon Scott

The dying bees, the Antarctic melt, the mountains of old tires, the incessant toxic belch of factories that make Batman bobbleheads for Happy Meals. Off-gassing couches! Cancerous tinned tomatoes! Imprisoned killer whales! Our breastmilk is poisoned. We live absurdedly, ridiculously. OUR BREASTMILK IS POISONED. Try and explain even one sliver of it to a kid, just one angle of a thousand, and you'll see the face of the world's most incredulous and urgent WTF.

We have little to recommend us, and we know it. We shrug.

Rasmus Krook is the Captain of the Griffons. He doesn't shrug. — Kate Inglis

In a plane again, Ashley thought sourly, her nose pressed to the window. Down below, glacier fought granite from horizon to horizon. This was the final leg of the two-day journey. Yesterday, they had flown the eight hundred miles from Buenos Aires to Esperanza, the Argentine army base on the tip on an Antarctic Peninsula. There, Ashley had her first taste of Antarctic air - like ice water poured into her lungs. — James Rollins

Men, as Amundsen liked to say, are the unknown factor in the Antarctic. — Roland Huntford

The Arctic and the Antarctic are melting quickly. We may have waited too long to get started. But this is a day for optimism because the battle is fully joined, and the idea that big oil is unbeatable is no longer true. — Bill McKibben

My Antarctic expedition is just about doable, just feasible and that's what is exciting to me. If I knew it was possible, if I knew I could do it without too much bother, I wouldn't be interested. — Ben Saunders

You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic. — Thomas Pynchon

In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959 ... sailor H.W. Tilman, looking for a crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: "Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure." Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon. — Peter Nichols

There are people who travel because they want to push themselves to physical limits, people who walk across deserts or cycle across the Antarctic - like Ranulph Fiennes, who just does it because it's there. And then there are people like me, who are just genuinely curious about the world. — Michael Palin

Antarctic symphony has a geometric relationship to the landscape. It's saying that this landscape and the minimal kind of, you know I'm talking like seeing ice, is visually kind of eerily minimal. — DJ Spooky

Behind us lay the great Antarctic Land; snow peaks rising beyond one another until by distance they dwindled away into insignificancy. The silence and immobility of the scene was impressive; not the slightest animation or vitality anywhere. It was like a mental image of our globe in its primitive state - a spectacle of Chaos. Around is ice and snow and the remnants of internal fires; above, a sinister sky; below the sombre sea; and over all, the silence of the sepulchre! — Louis Bernacchi

What I'm going for with the string arrangements for my Antarctic symphony is a pun here. — DJ Spooky

Now I know how to make it as a pedophile. Forget lollypops. Antarctic wildlife is the ticket. — Jacob M. Appel

[A]s previous studies have concluded, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are probably thickening rather than melting. — Myron Ebell

I have never suffered under any delusion that saving the whales in the Antarctic sanctuary would be easy, but the one thing I am certain of is that I and my passionate crew of international volunteers will never quit defending life in the seas from poachers, no matter what consequences we must endure to do so. — Paul Watson

Rule One: Make friends with death
Tailgating in the Antarctic is no joke. We are trying to do nothing less ambitious than reverse the course of history. We want Team Krill to defeat Team Whale.
Look, if you want to tailgate in comfort, don't get on the boat. You can buy some quail eggs or snails or whatever you people eat and you can watch the Food Chain Games on your flat TV. Stay in Los Angeles. Hug your wife on your plush banquette. Cheer for the Antarctic minke whales, like every other asshole.
No, wait a second, here comes the real Rule One: if you are a supporter of Team Whale, you can go fuck yourself, my fine sir.
This list is for the fans of Team Krill. — Karen Russell

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in war and some men are wounded; some men never leave the country, some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair. — John F. Kennedy

The Earth would only have to move a few million kilometers sunward-or starward-for the delicate balance of climate to be destroyed. The Antarctic icecap would melt and flood all low-lying land; or the oceans would freeze and the whole world would be locked in eternal winter. Just a nudge in either direction would be enough. — Arthur C. Clarke

Giordino ... simply sighed in resignation. "Who else," he asked no one in particular, "but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl? — Clive Cussler

When heavy cloud decks enveloped the planet, they created a whole new surface that had never before existed, of high mountain ranges, tumbling ravines. Sometimes the clouds would create huge cliffs, sheer walls miles high into which shadows fell to give them a startling sense of solidity, as though the whiteness below was some Antarctic winter mountain scene now spread across all the visible world. No oceans, no land surface, only that startling, shifting panorama, and then, suddenly, it became something else. Ethereal clouds. Some were misty, others wispy, but most were ghostlike. They appeared everywhere or strangely vanished, then showed up again, brushing the edges of islands and the shores of continents. They were members of the cloud family, a living race dancing and floating above the planetary surface. Astonished, awed, he had the strangest thought that perhaps this is what the angels could see . . . Deke gloried — Alan Shepard

Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go. — John Updike

Just think," she said, "the Antarctic is a world away, but the ocean here in front of us reaches all the way down there. We could board a ship and sail across this very sea to reach it. Perhaps the water in front of us now was lapping up against the shores of the Antarctic at this time last year." He looked at her without speaking. "What I am trying to say is, it makes the world seem so small." She didn't know how to say it to him, or even to herself, but what she meant was that it was all so vast, and yet even the smallest bits of matter, even invisible atoms, could cover the vastness, could claim both here and the place that was a world away. "It makes me feel small and yet eternal at the same time. — Natasha Bauman

I felt like on one hand the clarity of thought was amazing, but on the other we went during Antarctic summer, so the sun didn't set the whole time we were there. — DJ Spooky

It was the mystery that biologists from Darwin onwards had been longing to solve. How could we understand the ability of fish and seals to survive in the cold dark waters of the Antarctic? How could humans see inside a biotope that was sealed with layers of ice? What would the Earth look like from the sky, if we crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a goose? How did it feel to be a bee? How could we measure the speed of an insect's wings and its heartbeat, or monitor its blood pressure and eating patterns? What was the impact of human activities, like shipping noise or subsea explosions, on mammals in the depths? How could we follow animals to places where no human could venture? — Frank Schatzing

Could the waters of the Atlantic be drawn off, so as to expose to view this great sea-gash, which separates continents, and extends from the Arctic to the Antarctic, it would present a scene the most rugged, grand, and imposing. The very ribs of the solid earth, with the foundations of the sea, would be brought to light, and we should have presented to us at one view the empty cradle of the ocean ... — Matthew Fontaine Maury

It is foolish to claim, as some do, that emigration into space offers a long-term escape from Earth's problems. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest. — Martin Rees

Rivalry is one of the factors pushing me. While my back was turned, the Norwegians managed to achieve the first Arctic crossing in winter. I didn't want the same to happen in the Antarctic. — Ranulph Fiennes

The best experience that we have on Earth is the fact that we have scientific stations, weathering over stations down in the Antarctic for almost the entire 20th century to learn how to exist in exceedingly hazardous conditions; and the Moon is far more hazardous than Antarctica. At least they have water there. — Edgar Mitchell

And that bastard Breckinridge Scott, yes, the Phalanx king, still hiding like a rat in his Antarctic Fortress of Scumditude.
Arthur Sinclair — Max Brooks

I was beyond Ice Princess. I was Sorceress of the Antarctic and a bitchy one at that. — Kristen Ashley

One of the things that made me persist in the Antarctic in the face of sickening discouragements was my determination to name a portion of the earth's surface after my father. — Lincoln Ellsworth

When people die they are sometimes put into coffins, which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots.
But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the creamatorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or snow somewhere. — Mark Haddon

The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast - above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill - has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now. — David Quammen

Although it was pointless, I prayed that Julian would suddenly have flown to the Antarctic to live in a penguin colony. Or that he'd just say no. After all, it was he who'd been so emphatic that we should move on. He did neither. — Lucy Robinson

Year by year, more and more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. We have played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it. — James Russell Lowell

Since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Beginning in 1986, a series of field experiments were designed to test the various hypotheses which had been put forth to explain the Antarctic ozone hole. — Mario J. Molina

In Winter, [the Antarctic] is perhaps the dreariest of places. Our base, Little America, lay in a bowl of ice, near the edge of the Ross Ice Barrier. The temperature fell as low as 72 degrees below zero. One could actually hear one's breath freeze. — Richard E. Byrd

Having a baby isn't so bad. If you're a female Emperor penguin in the Antarctic. She lays the egg, rolls it over to the father, then takes off for warmer weather where she eats and eats and eats. For two months, the father stands stiff, without food, blind in the 24-hour dark, balancing the egg on his feet. After the little penguin is hatched, the mother sees fit to come home. — L. M. Boyd

I felt as lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably. — W.N.P. Barbellion

Obviously, because of my disability, I need assistance. But I have always tried to overcome the limitations of my condition and lead as full a life as possible. I have traveled the world, from the Antarctic to zero gravity. — Stephen Hawking

There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make fotr the eruption of volcanos in the Torrid areas ... The upper portion of Europe will be changed in the blink of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea. — Edgar Cayce

We are a nation of shop keepers. — Apsley Cherry-Garrard

After the conquest of the South Pole by Amundsen who, by a narrow margin of days only, was in advance of the British Expedition under Scott, there remained but one great main object of Antarctic journeying - the crossing of the South Polar continent from sea to sea — Ernest Shackleton

But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere. — Mark Haddon