The poles as planetary places

Abstract

Perhaps more than any other places on Earth, the geographic poles draw their identity from their relationship with outer space. The word “pole” itself referred, in its ancient Greek origin, to the axis of a turning cosmos (and later Earth), as well as the points where this axis met a posited celestial sphere. The terrestrial poles – the places where this invisible axis penetrate the planet’s surface – have long held particular cultural significance as the meeting points of the cosmic and the mundane. When European exploration towards both poles developed from early modern times, writers imagined these places as extraterrestrial portals: routes to the interior of the Earth, channels to an unseen sister planets, shortcuts to other planetary poles. Even with the advent of land-based exploring parties to both poles in the early twentieth centuries, planetary bodies remained central to place identity, with the movement of the sun, rather than any terrestrial feature, providing the best means of proving one’s arrival at these so-called “last places on Earth.” More recently, large-scale cosmological experiments such as those enabled by the South Pole Telescope and the IceCube neutrino detector address questions about the nature of matter and the origin of the universe, providing insight into the events and forces that ultimately set the planet spinning. At the same time, the Anthropocene has brought a new dimension to the poles’ relationship with outer space, with recent research confirming that human activity is shifting the Earth’s axis – and thus the position of the celestial poles – through its contribution to the global displacement of water and ice. In this article, we argue for the usefulness of considering Earth’s geographic poles, and particularly the South Pole, as “planetary places” – that is, specific, storied locations on Earth’s surface that are meaningful primarily in an (inter)planetary context. We begin by demythologising the geographic poles as well-defined points, looking not only to definitional complexities but also to “other” poles, Earthly and unearthly. We then suggest ways in which the poles have enabled certain kinds of thinking about the planet in relation to the human. Through an entangled natural and cultural history, we reveal the South Pole as a place both physically and imaginatively inseparable from Earth’s planetary spatiality.

Keywords:

• Anthropocene
• planetary places
• geographical imaginary
• geographic poles
• South Pole
• local and global

Notes

¹ “Melting Ice Sheets,” The Guardian, April 9, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/09/melting-ice-sheets-changing-the-way-the-earth-wobbles-on-its-axis-says-nasa; Peter Spinks, “Global Warming,” Sydney Morning Herald, April 15, 2016, http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/global-warming-is-changing-the-earths-tilt-20160413-go5tgb.html; and Bryan Clark Howard, “Climate Change,” National Geographic, April 8, 2016, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160408-climate-change-shifts-earth-poles-water-loss/.

² This “polar motion” with respect to the Earth’s surface is distinct from the planet's axial precession.

³ Spinks, “Global Warming,” April 15, 2016.

⁴ Interestingly, there is a long tradition of science fiction dealing with the converse phenomenon: axis shift causing climate change, and sometimes deliberately orchestrated to make resources available. Diverse examples include Jules Verne’s satire The Purchase of the North Pole (1889); J.M. Walsh’s science fiction short story “When the Earth Tilted” (1932); and Allan W. Eckert’s The HAB Theory (1976). Gustavus Pope’s Journey to Mars, discussed below, raises the possibility with respect to both Earth and Mars (492). Deliberately caused magnetic pole shift has also seen fictional treatment; see e.g. Clive Cussler’s thriller Polar Shift (2005).

⁵ See e.g. Haynes, “Astronomy and the Dreaming,” 59.

⁶ Nelson, “Symmes Hole,” 145.

⁷ Amundsen, The South Pole, 121.

⁸ Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 216.

⁹ For this reason, in the following, we assume a rough equivalence of the geographic and rotational poles, unless otherwise stated.

¹⁰ Auroral activity is usually concentrated in an oval-shaped band around the Geomagnetic Pole, which is itself different from the Magnetic Pole.

¹¹ Solar flares, for example, can create magnetic “storms” in Earth’s atmosphere, which can interrupt communication satellites and electricity grids (Moldwin, Introduction to Space Weather, 1).

¹² We refer here to rotational poles; some but not all planets also have, like Earth, magnetic poles.

¹³ Archinal et al., “Report of the IAU Working Group,” 105. A system’s invariable plane passes through its centre of mass and is perpendicular to the vector of its angular momentum.

¹⁴ For other bodies, such as dwarf planets and comets, a different (although no less anthropocentric) convention applies: the right-hand rule, in which the “positive pole” lies in the direction a human thumb points to when the fingers of the right-hand curl in the direction of rotation (Ibid., 116).

¹⁵ Moraru, “Decompressing Culture,” 214.

¹⁶ Giles, “Writing for the Planet,” 145.

¹⁷ Olson and Messeri, “Beyond the Anthropocene,” 28, 43.

¹⁸ See e.g. Leane, “Yesterday’s Tomorrows,” 340–43.

¹⁹ De Loughrey, “Satellite Planetarity,” 266, 275.

²⁰ Giles, “Writing for the Planet,” 144–5.

²¹ Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye.

²² De Loughrey, “Satellite Planetarity,” 263; and Heise, Sense of Place, 23.

²³ On the development of ideas concerning the poles in ancient Greek geography and cosmology, see Couprie, Heaven and Earth.

²⁴ Dirk Couprie astutely observes that one would expect there to be numerous myths explaining the apparent “tilting” of the axis of the heavens, though relatively few seem to appear. He cites only a Chinese myth. Heaven and Earth, 69.

²⁵ Cratylus 405c.

²⁶ Apollo’s character as a solar deity, though prominent later, is relatively recently acquired at the time of composition of the Cratylus, so is less likely to be a factor in this passage.

²⁷ Plato, Timaeus 33b.

²⁸ Ibid., 33a–b.

²⁹ Eratosthenes, Geography fragment 30 = Strabo, Geography 2.5.5-6. For commentary on this passage, see Roller, Eratosthenes’ Geography, 144–7.

³⁰ On these maps, see Hiatt, “Map of Macrobius.”.

³¹ On Macrobius, see Stahl, Macrobius and “Astronomy and Geography”; Flamant, Macrobe et le néoplatonisme latin; Mras, Macrobius Kommentar; and Schedler, Philosophie.

³² Aëtius, Placita 3.17.7, attributes this view to Crates.

³³ Macrobius, Commentarium 2.9.2–3.

³⁴ Eratosthenes, Hermes, fragment 16, lines 9–12. See Powell, Collectanea Alexandrina 62–3 with brief notes. The same fragment, with fuller discussion, is number 19 in Hiller, Eratosthenis Carminum Reliquiae, 56–64. For discussion of this poem: Solmsen, “Eratosthenes.” Translations are our own.

³⁵ Homer, Odyssey 11.13–19.

³⁶ The work has generally been dated to the second century in the belief that Lucian’s True History parodies it, and that later Greek novels of travel and adventure draw upon it (as Photius already believed). See on this text Morgan who questions whether Deinias is supposed to have visited the moon or merely to have seen it from close by from the north pole (“Lucian’s True Histories,” 478). Photius’ summary is too compressed to be sure.

³⁷ See Photius, Biblotheca 166–185 for this summary of Diogenes Antonius.

³⁸ Pytheas of Massilia travelled to Britain and “Thule”. This is possibly Iceland, but nothing is certain about its location (Cunliffe, Pytheas, 116–133) beyond its position in the frozen north. Pytheas’ account was used by Eratosthenes but rejected by many of Eratosthenes’ successors, including Strabo. Since Strabo offers our main account of Eratosthenes’ lost Geographica, and since he seems to have excised any material he believed to be from Pytheas, it is very difficult to reconstruct much of Pytheas’ text. See Roller, Eratosthenes’ Geography, 18.

³⁹ David Fausett points to the “interplay of ignorance and knowledge” in early fiction set in the antipodes. Images of the Antipodes, 10.

⁴⁰ Peter Fitting’s Subterranean Worlds is an excellent compendium of different visions of the “Hollow Earth”.

⁴¹ Nelson, “Symmes Hole,” 149.

⁴² Blum, “John Cleves Symmes,” 249, 246–7, 266.

⁴³ Cavendish, The Blazing World, 61–2.

⁴⁴ Carroll, Empire of Air and Water, 26.

⁴⁵ Ibid.; and Cavendish, The Blazing World, 123.

⁴⁶ Cavendish, The Blazing World, 78; and Spiller, “Reading Through Galileo’s Telescope,” 216.

⁴⁷ Erskine, Armata, vol. 1, 7; vol. 2, 46.

⁴⁸ Wells, A Modern Utopia, 22–3.

⁴⁹ Pope, Journey to Mars, 90. Little is known of Pope other than details included in the novel’s title page and note: he was a medical doctor who lived in Washington, D.C. His cosmic model in Journey to Mars seems to conflate the magnetic and geographic poles.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 267, 279, 294–5, 326, 227, 362.

⁵¹ Jean DeMerit, “IceCube South Pole Neutrino Laboratory: Week 5 at the Pole,” University of Wisconsin-Madison, http://icecube.wisc.edu/news/view/300.

⁵² See Leane, South Pole, ch. 8.

⁵³ Much of the science performed at the South Pole is focused not on the place itself but what can be seen from it, via astronomy, seismology, the drilling of ice cores and other methodologies. See Leane, South Pole, ch. 7.

⁵⁴ Neither IceCube nor the SPT is an optical telescope in the conventional sense; the SPT is a radio telescope.