Field Notes: 62°South
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I had the rare chance to experience Antarctica not as a visitor, but from inside the ecosystem — living and working alongside scientists who come here to understand it, not just see it. Learning the rhythms of one of the most intact ecosystems on Earth changes how you see everything. Field Notes: 62° South is a record of that experience.
Antarctica doesn’t reveal itself quickly. The journey there is part of the experience — days at sea, surrounded by ice older than human memory, before you even set foot on land. For two centuries, people have been making this crossing driven by the same restless need to understand what lies at the edge of the known world. The early explorers came with compasses and courage. Their names have never stopped inspiring — Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott — men with no maps, no guarantees, only the conviction that what lay beyond the ice was worth knowing.
The people who work here didn’t come only for the scenery. They came with questions — about glaciers that have been retreating for decades, about rocks that hold a record of climates long before our own, about ecosystems that are changing faster than we can document. Antarctica is not just a remote place. It is where the consequences of a warming planet become impossible to ignore — the Antarctic Peninsula is warming five times faster than the global average. What happens here doesn’t stay here. The ice that melts into this ocean raises coastlines thousands of miles away. You don’t spend time here without it changing something fundamental about the way you see everything else.
Most people who visit Antarctica will see it from the deck of a ship — briefly, comfortably, before moving on. Few will ever see it in this light. To experience it differently requires time, discomfort, and a willingness to leave behind most of what we consider essential. Maybe that is exactly as it should be. The nature here exists in a harmony that took millions of years to build — ice, ocean, wildlife and silence in a balance so complete it feels untouchable. We are the only ones who don’t belong. We arrive with tonnes of iron and concrete, with loud engines and layers of specialized gear, the only creatures on Earth who need all of that simply to be here. We are the only thing that doesn’t quite fit.
