Essays and evidence from the end of the world.

The Ice Remembers What We Agreed to Forget

A core of Antarctic ice is a ledger. Every year nobody acted is in there, sealed in air you can still breathe.

The drill comes up warm, which is the first surprise. Twelve hundred metres down the ice is older than agriculture, and it arrives on the sledge steaming faintly in the wind, like something just killed. Inside it there is air — actual air, held in bubbles the size of a full stop, from a year when nobody alive had heard the phrase parts per million. The glaciologist holds the section up against the sun and hands it to you, because that is what they do with visitors. You look through a century. It is not a metaphor for anything. That, in the end, is the difficulty with it.

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