Teleportation to Antarctica

 

Windy, arid, unfertile, seemingly cursed to be hidden from the rest of the world.

Lost in the deep south of our planet, being pressured by the heaviness of

its involuntary isolation, Antarctica, land of unbreakable cycles and magnificent panoramas.

 

 

Human minds are fascinating mechanics that can create any type of décor, real or surreal, with just the impulse of a nervous signal, our mind is a well trained craftsman which is responsible with the materialization of our most simplistic or exuberant playgrounds for dreaming and mediation. By letting our mind do its duty, we can jump from one scene to another, structuring, distorting and coloring shapes, elements and energetic cycles within the realm in which we are the manipulators of the natural balance. A transition from reality to fiction, our mind teleports us in to place that are physically far away, that are inaccessible, hard to find, it gives us the incredible opportunity of traveling spiritually to every corner of the Earth. Let’s use our minds and our currently existing knowledge to travel to a place which redefines that notion of beauty, a places that shocks through its simplicity and determination to in total peace with all of the surrounding environments.

This place is Antarctica, the frozen continent according to many clichés, a hermetically sealed land that is always constant in its cycles of rejuvenation. A territory which is traditionally regarded as unwelcoming, the land from the bottom of the Earth seems to had fascinated both past and present generations, its vernacular and mainly unspoiled characteristics made Antarctica one of the world’s most unique places to visit.

The Antarctic environment is highly complex even though it may seem rudimentary and repetitive to the ones which don’t have a solid knowledge of it, the contact with this environment is challenging from a number of perspectives, one of them being that of space orientation. For those of us who have a poorly developed sense of visually analyzing our living environment, going through the grounds of Antarctica would present a challenge to do absence of highly distinctive elements that could help us with our special orientation, do to the repetitive character of the environment, our capacity to actually not get lost is quite limited.  The repetitive character is primarily caused by the absence of an actual vegetal environment together with its variations which sets natural paths and roads, thus making our cognition to run at normal parameters.  

Antarctica’s frozen surface is permanently whipped by winds, thus being created an atmosphere which is centered around the violent force of Nature, ironically or not, this force doesn’t have a destructive character. The already sterile, flat and stony landscape is immune to the blizzard, its surface lacks vegetal organism, for most of the part. Seeing things from the perspective of an European who lived all of his life in a country with well balanced continental climate, Antarctica is the ultimate natural experimental ground for extreme weather phenomena, those can vary from extreme temperatures to wind speeds or to the melting of the icecap.

A luxuriant environment, noble and with a highly pretension in its presentation to the outside world, Antarctica gets its nobility from the simplicity of its vernacular shapes, from the spectacle of light and shadows. The polar sun is am awkward and seemingly uncaring god, being present only through appearance and not through actions, being insensible to the suffering of the frozen ground beneath it.

Engaging in a flight across the frozen surface, our eyes get quickly tired of the repletion of shapes and shades of color, the costal lines break the monotony of the inland with impressive snow covered cliffs and bays filled with heavy chunks of ice.

The inland and the coastline obviously have they similarities, as a result of being subdivisions of the same continent, even so, a easily noticeable contrast intervenes,  the static nature of the inland that is disturbed from time to time by the harshness of the winds that travel from the center to the coasts, and kinetic substance of the costal areas, both contrasting but complementary in the same time.

An alien planet hidden by the waters of the planetary ocean, Antarctica, is the perfect scene for both a fairytale or for a comic with alien invaders.  

A trip, both physically or with the mind and spirit, opens the individual to an obscure universe, governed by natural and not social laws, an universe with unbreakable cycles, with both balance and a strong self identity.

Rothera, Crown of Antarctica, stands as a testimony to human intervention even in the most hostile environments. The scientific base of Rothera is truly the Crown of Antarctica do to its symbolism, the nobility of sacrifice for scientific progress which is carried out by the scientists that work there.

Teleporting ourselves back to the intimacy of our bedroom, we become conscious of the asymmetries of the natural world, we become more aware of the capability that nature has for self conservation and probably more understanding in our incapability to fully manipulate nature in order to fit our own interests.