Antarctic climate futures: how Terra incognita becomes Terra clima

Abstract

The Antarctic has come to be considered a place of climate change, both in parallel to broader global understandings of anthropogenic climate change and in response to previous conceptions of the Antarctic as blank, empty, scientific or peaceful. This article shows how a place becomes irresistibly linked to a global discourse through concerted effort as well as technoscientific ways of thinking about nature. Further, this paper demonstrates how the apparently blank Antarctic becomes inscribed with and saturated by popular imaginations, as well as the ways Antarctic actors trouble, confound and are made to fall into line with the tropes of global climate catastrophe. To do this, the article reviews recent scientific research in the Antarctic as ways in which nature – including penguins, ice and flowering plants – inscribe their response to climate change on the continent, as well as some data that “confounds” the narrative of Antarctic warming, melting and collapsing. The article concludes with an analysis of policy considerations that this analysis engenders.