Otherworldly Antarctica: Ice, Rock, and Wind at the Polar Extreme

With stunning original photographs, an Antarctic scientist and explorer takes us to one of the most sublime, remote, and pristine regions on the planet.

The interior of Antarctica is an utterly pristine wilderness, a desolate landscape of ice, wind, and rock; a landscape so unfamiliar as to seem of another world. This place has been known to only a handful of early explorers and the few scientists fortunate enough to have worked there. Edmund Stump is one of the lucky few. Having climbed, photographed, and studied more of the continent-spanning Transantarctic Mountains than any other person on Earth, this geologist, writer, and photographer is uniquely suited to share these alien sights.

With stories of Stump’s forty years of journeys and science, Otherworldly Antarctica contains 130 original color photographs, complemented by watercolors and sketches by artist Marlene Hill Donnelly. Over three chapters--on the ice, the rock, and the wind--we meet snowy paths first followed during Antarctica’s Heroic Age, climb the central spire of the Organ Pipe Peaks, peer into the crater of the volcanic Mount Erebus, and traverse Liv Glacier on snowmobile, while avoiding fatal falls into the blue interiors of hidden crevasses. Along the way, we see the beauty of granite, marble, and ice-cored moraines, meltwater ponds, lenticular clouds, icebergs, and glaciers. Many of Stump’s breathtaking images are aerial shots taken from the planes and helicopters that brought him to the interior. More were shot from vantages gained by climbing the mountains he studied. Some were taken from the summits of peaks. Many are of places no one had set foot before--or has since. All seem both permanent and precarious, connecting this otherworld to our fragile own.

Edmund Stump is a retired professor of exploration at Arizona State University where he taught geology for thirty-seven years. In a research career funded by the National Science Foundation spanning forty years and thirteen Antarctic field seasons, he studied and sampled rocks throughout the 1,500-mile length of the Transantarctic Mountains and collected samples from the Vinson Massif, the highest summit in Antarctica. He is the author of The Roof at the Bottom of the World: Discovering the Transantarctic Mountains.