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Five years ago, I worked briefly as an assistant in a Montessori elementary classroom. A few weeks into my time there I found myself on the playground, watching along with thirty silent children between the ages of nine and six as their teacher began to unroll a bolt of black fabric across the wood chips. “At first the earth was a fiery ball,” she said, “and this went on for a long time.” The fabric continued to unroll as she talked about volcanoes, rains, and cooling, and by the time the whole strip of fabric was laid out it was a hundred meters long, covering most of the playground. At the far end was one slender red line, which she told the students represented all of human history. This, she said, is how long it took the earth to be ready for the coming of the human being.
This lesson I witnessed, known now as the Black Strip, was first given more than seventy years before on the other side of the world. Italian doctor and educator Maria Montessori took what was supposed to be a six month training trip to India in 01939 after having found herself on the wrong side of the fascist powers of Europe. The Nazis had closed Germany’s Montessori schools and reportedly burned her in effigy. Mussolini, with whom she had originally collaborated, followed suit and closed Italy’s schools after Dr. Montessori, a pacifist, refused to order her teachers to take the fascist loyalty oath.
This seemingly opportune moment to leave Europe also came up against the moment when Italy entered World War II on the side of the Axis powers. As an Italian in India, Montessori was at the mercy of the British colonial government. They confined her to the grounds of her host organization — India’s Theosophical Society — and interned her adult son Mario, who had come along with her. Mario was eventually released and Montessori’s internment relaxed, but neither of them was permitted to leave India for the duration of the war. Their six month trip became seven years of training teachers and students in her methodology throughout India and Sri Lanka, and to this day a robust network of Montessori education remains in place there.
According to Montessori biographer Cristina De Stefano, it was during these seven years in India that Montessori developed much of what would become the natural history curriculum in her schools. The story behind the Black Strip I saw all those years later goes like this: some of Montessori’s Indian students considered their civilization superior to hers because it was older, one of the oldest in the world. In response, she devised a piece of black fabric three hundred meters long, spooled onto a dowel rod and unwound by a bicycle wheel down a village road somewhere near Kodaikanal. Montessori told her students that the black fabric (which has since been shortened by most Montessori schools for practical reasons) represented the fullness of geologic time on Earth, and that the line at the far end was the entire history of our species, Indian and Italian alike.
There’s no record of exactly how old these first students were, but current Montessori practice introduces the Black Strip along with what are known as The Great Lessons at the beginning of elementary school, where it is repeated each year so that by the time they are nine, students have seen the strip unroll three times.
Six years old might seem a bit early to introduce the depths of geologic time, but according to Alison Awes, the AMI Director of Elementary Training at the Montessori Center of Minnesota and the Director of Elementary Training at the Maria Montessori Institute in London, it’s exactly the right age. She notes that in Dr. Montessori’s scientific observations of children, “they were capable of so much more than what adults typically expected.” Elementary age children, Montessori noticed, possessed a strong capacity to reason, a drive to understand the world around them and how it functioned
Tracy Fortun, the teacher I worked for who rolled out the Black Strip on that day five years ago, tells me that the other elementary superpower that makes this the perfect age to introduce these concepts is a vivid imagination. Before her training, Fortun thought of imagination simply as fantasy, but she now sees it as a necessary tool for thinking about anything we can’t observe. “I have to use my imagination to think about five billion years,” she says.
Montessori lessons about natural history, like the Black Strip and the Clock of Eras (a poster of an analog clock in which the last 14 seconds represent humanity, presented once children are old enough to tell time), are not meant to deliver facts. Those, Fortun tells me, can come later. There is no scale of years to centimeters on the strip, nor are there many words spoken as it is rolled out. The lessons are impressionistic in order to engage the faculties of reason and imagination together and prompt a child’s own responses and questions, for which they can then seek answers. Awes tells me a story of a child who heard the third Great Lesson, The Coming of Human Beings, and then decided to sit down and make a list of every single thing he had done that day with his hands — tasks and capabilities unique to his species.
Each Montessori lesson involving the concept of deep time is a particular blend of these same components. There’s the Timeline of Life, in a sense the opposite of the Black Strip — it’s crammed with pictures of the different forms of life inhabiting each geologic era up to our own. Then there is the Hand Chart, similar to the Black Strip but with one picture on it: a hand holding a stone tool. On the Hand Chart the black expanse represents, instead of geologic time, all of human history before the invention of writing, and the small red line at the end contains the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, everything any of us has ever written. “Human beings have been busy,” says Fortun to her students, “using their intelligence, using their hands, transforming their environment, taking care of each other, telling their stories, for all this time before anybody wrote anything down.”
And there is the BCE/CE timeline that uses a string teachers pull on both ends, to show that time is going in both directions and we can at once learn about the past and imagine the future. The ends of the string are frayed to demonstrate that time is still going, always. Awes tells me that she once saw a group of children take out the BCE/CE timeline and proceed to organize themselves along it as the historical figures they were currently studying. “It was this ‘aha’ moment of, ‘Hey, you and I are living and working at the same time, but you guys are 800 years before.’”
Given the impressionistic nature of the lessons and the student-led response to them, I ask how exactly teachers can tell that the concepts are really sinking in. The response they all give is that the full results can take years to see. Fortun says that long after they’ve moved out of her classroom, students will put together a project that astounds her, and when she asks where they got the idea they will say, “Remember what you showed us in second grade?”
Children, it turns out, need time to process and incorporate these expansive ideas. “Something really deep and important is happening,” Awes says of the seemingly fallow periods that can follow these lessons, “we just might not know what it is. And that’s where the adult has to get out of the way of the child. We can be obstacles, because we don’t give children enough time to reflect.”
Seth Webb, Director of School Services at the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, echoes this sentiment. “What schools need to do to allow for these concepts to be rooted in the hearts and souls of kids is to give them the time to explore them. I mean, if you want an appreciation of deep time, you have to give them the time to appreciate it deeply.”
What strikes me most is the faith these teachers seem to have in their students. To wait on children in this way requires immense trust, especially in the high-stakes years of a child’s education. It’s an attitude that stands in sharp contrast to the anxious system I remember growing up, a system constantly requiring evidence that children are indeed learning everything they must know. The question, I suppose, is what we consider most essential in preparing children for the world we are going to hand them. In a Montessori framework, one of the most central interdisciplinary goals is for children to grasp what Dr. Montessori calls the Cosmic Task — something shared by animate and inanimate earth alike. Awes puts it this way: “Each organism and inanimate object has a dual purpose. One of the purposes is to do what they do for survival, but while doing that they're giving something back.” So plants, for instance, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in order to survive. But in doing that, what they give back to the rest of us is oxygen. There are lessons called “the work of wind” and “the work of water.” The universe and the earth are presented as a system of interdependence, developed over billions of years and honed with immense specificity to create the conditions under which life exists. Children who understand this, who are exposed to it repeatedly and given time to contemplate it, Awes tells me, start to wonder what their own Cosmic Task might be, how they might support their community and their future, how they might give back.
But how many children are even given the opportunity to wonder in this way? Maria Montessori began her work with some of Rome’s most underprivileged children, but now, in the U.S. at least, Montessori education is often seen as something of an elite luxury. In a widely read 02022 New Yorker review of De Stefano’s biography on Montessori, Jessica Winter noted that “there are only a few hundred public Montessori schools in the U.S.,” and that the Montessori method has been “routed disproportionately to rich white kids.”
Sara Suchman, the Executive Director of the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, paints a very different picture of Montessori in contemporary public education. In 02022 there were around 200,000 students receiving a Montessori education in nearly 600 U.S. public schools, she says, and more than half of them are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. In a letter to the editor challenging Winter’s review, Suchman wrote that “there is nothing inherent in a Montessori classroom or school that makes it the unique domain of the wealthy.”
What is certainly true of these public Montessori schools, however, is that they tend to almost always be choice schools — open to all students in a school district regardless of address, but with an enrollment cap that means only a certain number can be admitted. Suchman cites Mira Debs’ Diverse Families, Desirable Schools (02019) to explain that over time more white, higher-income families proactively work the system to place their children in such schools. This problem is beyond the scope of the Montessori model itself, though presumably not beyond the scope of education policy in general.
“When a single model is serving 200,000 students, that both shows accomplishment and also opportunity,” Suchman tells me. One of the reasons Montessori education is worth our advocacy, according to Suchman, is that it is the model that best takes into account both the present and the future. “Kids are human beings right now, in this moment, and they need a positive experience right now…but they also need to be prepared. A lot of other methodologies will do one or the other, but Montessori does them together.”
Making Montessori more publicly accessible and therefore available to children in a wider economic range is a challenge for many reasons, but one that Suchman highlights strikes directly at the allowance for deep contemplation: the tension introduced by yearly testing, and our expectation of seeing constant, steady, measurable improvement. We don’t want to wait, and Montessori classrooms — which are multi-generational and span three grades — tend to demonstrate a burst of gains in each third year. For instance, when schools test yearly they will often see a plateau through first and second grade in Montessori schools instead of steady progress, which can cause anxiety if allowances aren't made for the fact that third grade is when much of the progress will manifest.
Educators must be prepared to accept a certain amount of waiting, to take a longer view and give kids some time.
Even outside of more public schools transitioning to a full Montessori model, there are opportunities for some of these concepts and methodologies for teaching natural history to make their way into all kinds of classrooms. Seth Webb sees the current moment as an opportunity for pedagogical cross pollination: “There are really amazing teachers everywhere, regardless of the overarching pedagogical foundation. We’ve moved into a new era where our pedagogy would do well to collaborate more.”
Children who have been given the Great Lessons and the time to appreciate the interdependence of our environment, the fragility and specificity and particularity of circumstances that allow for our existence, who know what it took for the earth to “be ready” for us, might be just the kind of people that we need right now. According to the Clock of Eras, it’s been 14 seconds, and we don’t know how many seconds more we have. So what will we do?
Maria Montessori believed that she was working at the end of the Adult Epoch, and that what was coming was the Epoch of the Child. It’s unclear precisely what she had in mind with that terminology, but it seems to speak of a time when children who are treated with sufficient respect and given sufficient time and resources become adults and alter, on a large scale, the way we carry out our lives. Crucially, however, nothing new like this can be ushered in without decisions made now, by those of us who are not yet citizens of any of these new possibilities. A cosmic task for us, perhaps.
I can imagine what it might look like, rolled out in front of me. These brief years of our unprecedented technological dominion I imagine a pale, sickly yellow, the color of the fear so many of my generation seem to carry — the fear that we have gone too far. And at the end, slender but frayed at the edges to connote its expansion, a full, deep, blue-tinted black of possibility like a bare night sky, like a beginning.
Looking for vicuña is not for the faint of heart, or for those who suffer from car or altitude sickness. After two hours of bouncing along rough dirt roads in an all-wheel drive pickup, I finally spotted a vicuña drinking from a pond at about 17,000 feet above sea level. Then I saw another, and another. Once I knew how to look, the hillside was suddenly spotted with vicuña. Their pale cinnamon backs and white bellies blended in perfectly with the harsh rocky landscape.
The vicuña is the baby-faced, shy cousin of the llama. Their eyes are almost comically large in their delicate faces, with long eyelashes. They are famously shy and run like the wind from any perceived threat. They also have some of the softest fur in the world. That fur earned them a prominent place among the Inca’s pantheon of sacred animals. It’s also what also makes them so valuable today.
The finest natural fiber, vicuña fur is a mere nine to twelve microns in diameter. For comparison, cashmere ranges from fourteen to nineteen microns. Each delicate strand is hollow, making it incredibly lightweight and insulating.
Vicuña fur is also difficult to find. Very few companies make garments with vicuña, and they sell to a select few stores. Though the fur comes from Peru, most of what you’ll find in a shop is made in Italy. Only one brand, Kuna, sells products made in Peru. Regardless of where it’s made, a simple scarf costs $1,000 to $3,000 USD, and a full shawl can cost upwards of $10,000 USD. Each garment is sold with a certificate, showing that the fur was harvested ethically in government regulated shearings of wild vicuñas.
Vicuña fur was exceptionally valuable long before Italian manufacturing. The Inca, who ruled much of South America in the 01400s and 01500s, decreed that only the royal family could wear vicuña fur. Vicuñas were both sacred and protected: hunting one was punishable by death. Despite the Inca’s attachment to the vicuña, they were never domesticated. Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated llamas and alpacas, but the vicuña stayed wild.
During Incan times, the protection afforded the vicuña helped it thrive. When the Spanish arrived in South America, they estimated that about 2 million lived throughout the Andes. That is when the indiscriminate killing of vicuñas began, which decimated the population.
When the Inca lost control of South America, the vicuña lost its protection. In the late 01500s, hunting vicuña went from being a capital crime to being encouraged by the Spanish crown. Change started in 01777, when the Spanish Imperial Court decreed it was illegal to kill a vicuña. Simón Bolívar enacted a similar law in 01825. Neither effort had much effect, and poaching continued. In the 01960s, about 2,000 vicuña remained in Peru, and only 6,000 in all of South America.
In 01969, Peru and Bolivia signed an accord in La Paz that began a new era of protection for the vicuña. Chile and Ecuador joined soon after, followed by Argentina in 01971. After 01969, the population quickly began to recover. A census conducted by Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture in 02012 revealed over 200,000 vicuña in Peru. Convenio de la Vicuña found over 470,000 in all of South America in 02016.
Why were conservation efforts in the 01970s successful when similar laws had failed for the previous 200 years? One likely explanation is who controlled the lands where the vicuña live. Land grants from the Spanish crown to colonizers in the 01600s took control of the lands away from Indigenous Andeans. Even after independence, Peru’s rural areas suffered under a feudal system where Indigenous peoples worked as unpaid serfs, in conditions akin to modern slavery. It wasn’t until the Agrarian Reform in 01969 that Indigenous communities started to regain control of their lands. Ownership of large tracts of land passed from the descendants of Spanish colonizers to the Indigenous communities who live on them.
Today, most land in Peru’s puna, the high altitude plateau that covers much of southern Peru, is communally owned by rural Indigenous communities, though some is privately owned. According to Santiago Paredes, director of Pampas Galeras National Reserve, regardless of who owns the land, all vicuña must be protected. Any community, person or company that owns vicuña habitat must register a management plan with SERFOR, Peru’s National Forest and Wildlife Service. The plans include specific ways that vicuña will be protected from poaching, as well as how their habitat will be conserved and, if possible, improved.
Even with the population rebounding, vicuñas are still at risk. The biggest threats to their survival are loss of habitat due to climate change, competition for grazing with domestic animals, diseases like mange, and poaching.
Climate models predict decreasing rainfall in the central and southern mountain ranges in Peru, which is precisely where vicuñas live. According to USAID’s Climate Risk Profile for Peru, “temperature increases are forcing lower-elevation ecosystems to move higher, encroaching upon endemic species and ecosystems and increasing risk of extinction of high-mountain species.” As climate change pushes vicuña higher up the peaks, their habitat shrinks and fragments.
It is legal to graze livestock on vicuña habitat, which decreases their food supply. Contact with domesticated animals and rising temperatures may be causing the increasing mange outbreak among vicuña. While more research is needed, a 02021 study in Peru found that 6.1% of vicuña surveyed were infected. The parasite not only saps the animal’s energy, it destroys their fur, which makes them vulnerable to the extreme cold of the Andes. Mange is now the leading cause of death in vicuñas.
Some of these threats are easier to manage than others. In 02022, Peru’s National Agrarian Health Service (SENASA) began treating vicuña for mange in eleven regions. Enforcement of anti-poaching laws is improving. The nebulous threat of climate change is much harder to combat. Communities now focus on protecting the vicuña’s habitat, hoping that their efforts to improve the vicuña’s food and water supply will compensate for the damages of climate change.
The most important aspects of vicuña habitat are a constant source of water, native grasses for grazing, and an absence of human development. Unlike most camelids, vicuña must drink water every day. They are territorial animals and live in small herds with one alpha male and up to ten females with their offspring. During the day, they spread out in grassy meadows to graze. At night, they climb up rocky hillsides to sleep on bare slopes where predators, such as puma, don’t have enough cover to get close.
All of this makes harvesting their fur quite complicated. Centuries ago, Andean civilizations developed the chaccu, a ritual gathering of vicuña herds to shear the fur before releasing the animals to the wild. In the 01990s, the population had grown enough to bring back the ancient tradition.
During a chaccu, people spread out in a loose circle up to a mile from a vicuña herd. They close in slowly, clapping their hands and making noise to concentrate the vicuñas in the center of the circle. Small chaccus may capture a dozen animals in one day, while larger ones can capture hundreds over a few days.
Today, chaccu isn’t exactly the same as it was five hundred years ago. An Incan ruler no longer presides over the ceremony. Communities now have trucks to drive out into the puna to get close to vicuña herds, trips that would previously have taken days or even weeks on foot. Shearing is now done quickly, with electric shears. Also, the fur is no longer kept for the royal family. It’s sold to international companies, many of which export it to Italy.
Chaccu organizers register the date and location with their local government. Three government officials plus a veterinarian oversee each event and ensure that all vicuña protection protocols are followed correctly. SENASA’s plan to treat vicuña for mange relies on chaccu.
Veterinarian Óscar Áragon has worked with vicuña for years and comes from a family that has raised alpaca for at least six generations. He has a master’s degree in South American camelids from the National Altiplano University in Puno, Peru.
“There are three steps to a modern chaccu,” Áragon explains. “When a vicuña is caught, the veterinarian first checks it for disease and draws blood samples. If it is sick, it’s treated. If not, it’s sent to the second stage, where somebody checks the length of the fur. It must be at least seven centimeters long so they can shear off five centimeters. It takes two or three years for their fur to grow that long. If the fur is long enough, then the animal is taken to the shearing station.”
In the early 02000s, a kilo of uncleaned vicuña fur could sell for as much as $600 USD. According to biologist Felix de la Cruz Huamani, the price has been dropping steadily since, which could pose a threat to this ancestral practice. A large chaccu takes hundreds of people several days’ of work to carry out. Most communities hold chaccu as a cultural tradition and use the money they earn from selling the fur to subsidize the event.
As the price of vicuña fur plummets, some communities have started to appeal to the Peruvian government for help, asking for funding to continue holding chaccus. Ongoing political chaos in Peru has hampered efforts to get needed support from the government. If the government won’t help, the second line of defense is tourism.
In 02022, two communities in the north of the Ayacucho region, Ocros and Santa Cruz de Hospicio, invited tourists to participate in chaccu. Armando Pariona Antonio grew up in Ayacucho and has worked with vicuña for over fifteen years. He created the company Vicunga Travel, named for the scientific name of the vicuña, to bring tourists to communities in Ayacucho. There are a lot of challenges, he says, to making chaccu a tourist activity.
“They hold chaccus wherever the vicuña are, and that’s always a remote place at high altitude. Also, communities need a lot of training on how to work with tourists.” Despite the challenges, Pariona Antonio is determined to help communities continue the tradition.
Felix de la Cruz Huamani believes we can look at the challenge of protecting the vicuña from a different angle.
“Landowners who have a land management plan for vicuña are required to protect and improve the ecosystem as part of their commitment to protect the vicuña,” explained de la Cruz Huamani. “We know that the vicuña’s habitat is rich in water. If we focus on the benefits of the ecosystem, we see that cities in Peru all depend on the water that comes from the vicuña’s habitat.” As the climate changes and water becomes more scarce, focusing national attention on the conservation of the vicuña’s habitat as a water source may have a bigger impact on protecting the vicuña than tourism or selling fur.
Peru’s environmental goals for 02030 include strategies for improving species conservation and reducing ecosystem damage. However, political instability is a significant challenge in meeting these targets. The Ministry of Environment, which is responsible for the 02030 goals, had four different ministers in 02022.
In the end, what is most likely to save the vicuña from all the threats it faces is its strong cultural bond with Indigenous Andeans. Now that they have reestablished the tradition of chaccu, communities that coexist with wild vicuña are determined to not lose the practice again.
“Nowhere else in the world do people have this kind of interaction with wild animals,” Pariona Antonio said. “It is a unique practice that comes to us from our Wari ancestors, the civilization that was in Ayacucho before the Inca conquered them.”
Peru’s Indigenous Andeans who honor their ancestral traditions may be the vicuña’s best bet for survival.
The comments sections of Dr. Peter Neff’s TikToks are filled with this sort of stuff. He’s a glaciologist and ice scientist, stationed in Antarctica over the summer and conducting vital experiments on Antarctica’s vast ice sheets and glaciers. He responds to many of these comments with humor. At the same time, he doesn’t give them too much thought.
“[My videos] are more just to show people the reality, rather than actually address the ridiculous conspiracy theories,” Neff told me, calling from McMurdo Station on the tail end of his field season in Antarctica. “They don't really deserve much air in my mind.”
The “ice wall,” or the idea that Antarctica is not a continent at the bottom of the globe but really a wall that circumscribes the Flat Earth, is a common refrain; as is the concept that “nobody is allowed” to go to Antarctica: that “they” (shady government agents) will prevent anyone from visiting, in order to keep whatever lies behind the ice wall hidden.
At the turn of the 20th century, Antarctica was still largely unknown. As Apsley Cherry-Garrard observed in the introduction to his classic book The Worst Journey In The World (01922): “Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man’s habitation.” But despite the hundred-plus years of exploration, habitation, and documentation since then, Antarctica remains utterly Other. It’s far away, it’s unlike anywhere else on the planet, and most people will never go there. They’ll only see pictures, and watch classic films like The Thing (01982) which project an image of peril and isolation onto the public consciousness.
Where gaps in public knowledge exist, conspiracies spring into life. Any post by a scientist or public figure about Antarctica will inevitably rack up comments accusing the original poster of “hiding” something, or of working for the government. Today’s landscape of Antarctic conspiracies is a tangled web — comprising everything from AI-generated Lovecraftian images purporting to be from turn-of-the-century expeditions, Nazis and UFOs, global warming denial, and flat-earthery. It’s a locus of conspiratorial thinking from all corners of the political compass, all converging, like lines of longitude, on the ice.
These sentiments might seem strange, but they're just the latest in a long history of projecting fantasies onto the southern continent. While the Arctic, thanks to its relative proximity to seafaring civilizations, was explored beginning in the Age of Discovery in the 01500s, the terra australis incognito at the bottom of the earth remained mysterious for far longer. The circumnavigations of Captain Cook in the 01770s proved that the area was frozen and uninhabitable, and fringed by seemingly impenetrable pack-ice. The reports that he brought back probably inspired Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (01798), which launched tropes of the frigid Antarctic into the wider cultural consciousness.
The southern continent itself was not observed until the 01820s, when adventurous whaling captains spotted it and added it to their charts. The simultaneous voyages of Ross (Britain), D’Urville (France), and Wilkes (USA) in 01839 added much to the world’s stock of knowledge of the Antarctic, but after that, investigation did not resume for over 50 years. When the North’s mysteries ceased to hold appeal, the world’s attention turned south to the Antarctic in the 01890s. Suddenly the region seemed to hold immense promise for scientific investigation, the claiming of new territories, and perhaps even the exploitation of mineral resources. The ensuing openly imperial Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration segued into the slightly more covert geopolitical jockeying of the mid-20th century. This reached a fever pitch with the International Geophysical Year of 01957-58, resulting in the Antarctic Treaty of 01959, which officially demilitarized the continent and set it aside as the exclusive preserve of scientific activity.
Many of the favored points for conspiracists have to do with government and military operations during this Cold War era. Neff points out the importance of the military presence on Antarctica, specifically the US military: “Their ability to operate their logistical capabilities are what give us the greatest scientific capability in Antarctica of basically any country.”
Despite Antarctica being “the continent of science,” with all military operations being banned since the Antarctic Treaty of 01959, the ongoing game of international geopolitics forms the underlying purpose of activity in the region. While military activity qua activity is verboten, it is the planes and personnel of various militaries which provide the structural capacity for people to live and work there.
Sara Wheeler, in her transformational Antarctic travel book Terra Incognita (01996), succinctly defines that paradox: “Collective consciousness must believe in the deification of science on the ice, otherwise it would have to admit that the reason for each nation’s presence in Antarctica is political, not scientific.”
That isn’t to say the vital climatic science done on Antarctica is in any way false or tainted. Scientists like Neff just want to be transparent about how it is they get to do the things they do, and go to the places they go. “It’s so hard to access these places, and the best way to get to them from a science perspective is through organized government programs,” he says. The mantling of the truth, though, is something that perhaps the conspiracists can sense, but are unable to understand or articulate, and so seek explanation in the outlandish. So the communal cooperative fantasy fails, and through the cracks come the crackpots.
A great deal of Antarctic theories, whether their proponents are aware of it or not, have roots in the original polar conspiracy of John Cleve Symmes Jr. Symmes was a US Army officer from Cincinnati who devoted his life to promoting his theory of the “hollow earth.” His claims changed over time, but the central thrust of the idea was that the earth was a hollow shell 800 miles thick, with thousand-mile-wide openings at both of the poles, through which a fertile interior could be accessed by intrepid explorers. In the late 01810s he confined his ideas to privately printed circulars and pamphlets, but by 01820 had begun lecturing around the country. He became somewhat well known, with his theories gaining traction after publication in outlets like the National Intelligencer; and it was his disciple Joshua Reynolds who helped drum up government support to launch the Wilkes Exploring Expedition of 01839, America’s first official venture to Antarctica.
The presence of Symmes’s theories in the public consciousness is visible in Edgar Allan Poe’s novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (01838), in which the titular character is carried in an open boat below the Antarctic Circle to a tropical land populated by dark-skinned subhumans, and thence to a frigid whirlpool at the North Pole, seemingly leading to some kind of mysterious interior space, inhabited by a giant shrouded figure: “And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.”
The desire for polar and Antarctic space to be indeterminate and undiscovered, for something beyond human understanding to be hiding underneath or within the ice, is a common underlying feature to Antarctic conspiracies.
In the mid-20th century, after the fervor of the Heroic Age of Shackleton and Scott died down, and the old school of isolated cross-continental man-hauling through ice and wind had been made obsolete by motors, planes, and radios, it was the Antarctic flights of Richard Byrd that captured the world’s imagination. Byrd, a decorated officer in the US Navy, was a pioneer of early flight. He claimed to be the first person to fly over the North Pole in 01926 (though that claim has since been disputed, thanks to evidence belatedly discovered in Byrd’s diary) and led five separate expeditions to the Antarctic from the 01920s through the 01950s. While the first two of these expeditions were independent, the latter three were conducted by the US government. Operation Highjump, the 01946-7 expedition led by Byrd, established a research base on the Ross Ice Shelf known as Little America IV; and Operation Deep Freeze of the 01950s under his direction was a massive operation which saw the first permanent American bases being constructed at McMurdo and the South Pole by Navy Seabees.
These expeditions, and Byrd himself, form the nucleus of a galaxy of conspiracies. The comments section of a newsreel video about Byrd’s explorations are filled to the brim with assertions about what he “really” saw down there. In the Ancient Aliens segment about Byrd’s “discoveries,” one common version of the tale is described, ostensibly recorded in a recently-recovered “lost diary.” Byrd, on his flight over the continent, enters a fertile hollow earth and meets a race of UFO-flying inhabitants who express disappointment in humanity’s recourse to nuclear power. Alternatively: he met and fought with Nazi-piloted flying saucers, which is why Operation Highjump necessitated such a large expeditionary force being brought back to Antarctica.
Nazis in Antarctica? Well, there’s a kernel of truth there. In 01939, the Third Reich sent an expedition to explore and claim part of Antarctica. The Schwabenland was equipped with planes, which dropped thousands and thousands of iron swastikas over the ice as they surveyed — none of which have ever been recovered.
The claim, in the remote sector of Dronning Maud Land already claimed by the Norwegians, was abandoned by the end of the war, but the concept of a Nazi base in the Antarctic lived on, messily pleated into the greater world of Antarctic conspiracy. Uncountable variations on the “Antarctic Nazis” myth have proliferated, including many versions in which Hitler and other senior Nazis did not die but sought shelter at an underground Antarctic base in New Schwabenland, and others that incorporate advanced Nazi technology in the form of UFOs and weapons.
On one of Neff’s TikToks, a commenter pleads: “The earth is hallow [sic], there’s entrances at the north and south pole where it suddenly gets warmer. if you can prove me wrong and go to the south pole could you try? i’ve been heavily convinced it’s hallow and it drives me crazy man [...]”
Being reduced to seeking confirmation of one’s conspiracy in the comments of a scientist is unfortunate. But it is also an example of how intoxicating the otherworldly potential of Antarctica is.
It may not be the location of the entrance to a hollow earth, but it is, in fact, hallow(ed). The only continent with no history of human habitation, the vast ice fields of Antarctica have formed a blank slate onto which humanity can project itself: all of itself, from the heroic, imperial superego to the conspiratorial id. It has attracted pilgrims and truth-seekers, scientists and artists, writers and soldiers.
Mapmakers of the early modern period placed monsters in the unknown corners of their charts: hic sunt dragones (“here be dragons”). The beasts were pushed further and further to the margins of the mappa mundi as the globe was explored, and eventually off the maps altogether, but the impulse to assign familiar, fire-breathing forms of danger and mystery to what would otherwise be unforgiving, cold, quiet places remain. The heated excitement of Antarctic conspiracies are the dragons of today.
[Read: Ahmed Kabil’s 02018 Long Now Ideas essay on early modern maps and the tendency for mapmakers to imagine monsters in uncharted regions]
Polar scholar Hester Blum, in her book The News At The Ends Of The Earth (02019), suggests that John Cleves Symmes’ conception of the hole at the bottom of the earth, the “polar verge,” with its five concentric spheres inside folding in on each other like a planetary Russian doll, is a fantasy about climactic extremities: a dream of impossible warmth and life where one would expect mundane cold and death.
So too, then, might be the fantasy of Byrd’s Symmesian discoveries, and the crystal cities and advanced beings inside the earth; or, as Joe Rogan associate Sam Tripoli frames it on an episode of Rogan’s popular podcast, “some time-traveling Nazi shit” involving a worldwide “spiritual war” centering on New Schwabenland. As the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove puts it in Apollo's Eye (02001), “there seems to be an unwillingness to contemplate these global regions without anxiety.” In the face of endless reports of the Earth’s climactic demise issuing from Antarctic research, many might find it easier to believe that the official line of doom and gloom disguises awesome and awful spectacles of aliens, Nazis, and denizens of a hollow (or flat) earth.
And let’s not forget that Antarctica is the planet’s most concentrated record of deep time. It is, as many scholars have noted, an archive in and of itself, stretching back eons, documenting changes to Earth’s atmosphere going back long past the last ice age. Human activity on the continent constitutes barely the smallest sliver of that time — and only on the fringes of the coasts and at a few minimal inland stations. The vastness of Antarctica is untouched and implacable; difficult to comprehend from a limited human perspective. Like the Shoggoths and Old Ones which inhabit the ancient, abandoned Antarctic of Lovecraft’s imagination in “At The Mountains of Madness,” the continent itself is apt to induce a sort of insanity, even for those who are not physically present.
But of course, there are people at this moment trying to comprehend it more fully and objectively. Way out on the ice, at the remote Dome C location on the Antarctic Plateau, scientists are beginning a project to retrieve ice core samples that are over one million years old. It will take them five years to retrieve the oldest samples which lie miles down, against the bedrock of the continent, but scientists will begin to analyze samples right away, seeking evidence of atmospheric shifts in the distant past, which can then be used to predict those that are coming in the near future.
Neff, and other environmental scientists and educators, were recruited by TikTok during the pandemic to make educational content for the platform. He sees the broad channels afforded by social media as a vital tool for environmental awareness. “We’re trying to share useful information, to keep people's baseline understanding of climate change up, rather than trying to save the people who have just been terribly misled,” he says. He is tentatively excited about the possibilities for Starlink and other new connectivity technologies to help communicate the realities of the Antarctic to the public.
But as climate scientists and communicators know all too well, just because evidence is provided doesn’t mean people will believe it. The inextricability of Antarctic history and military history is always going to induce skepticism amongst those already primed to distrust the establishment. There will always be people who dream at a distance of a “polar verge” and the secrets lurking beyond it.
In autumn 02021, I visited my hometown in Maryland for the first time in years after living across the country in New Mexico. I determined that the first stop on my trip would be a visit with my grandmother on the Eastern Shore. In Maryland, especially if one lives in proximity to the Bay, there is a delineation between the Western Shore and the Eastern Shore. The two coasts are connected by the Bay Bridge, but they’re quite different: The east is rural. Farmland is dotted with cows and the fields are filled to the brim with soybeans. Hunting for ducks is popular. There are no large cities and, instead, small, historic towns. The pace is slow. Many make their living by the water, whether that is via the tourism industry that booms in the summertime when families in cities flock to the quiet waterways, or through manning and repairing the boats that wander throughout rivers, streams, and the Bay proper. Others choose to drop crab traps and lines into the waters and cross their fingers as they yank them from the depths.
The Western Shore, on the other hand, is wrapped in highways. The land, if it wasn’t so developed, would be just as beautiful as the east. When I was growing up, most commuted into Annapolis, Washington D.C., or Baltimore for work. Because of that, the main conversation between adults was complaining about omnipresent, nerve-shredding traffic. My grandmother was born in the mountains of western Maryland, raised her family on the Western Shore, and retired to the Eastern Shore. I can’t help but correlate her with the waterways, the breeze, and the idle pace of the town, perhaps better called a village a hundred years ago, that she has called home for decades now.
Once I arrived at my grandmother’s, I was confronted by a simple fact: Even though I had been warned, her eyes were deteriorating. Prior to retirement, she had been a preschool teacher. She loved to read novels, play the piano, and paint. I spent a week with her each summer as I was growing up and savored the lazy, quiet days spent lounging across the fluffy comforters on her bed talking about books. I was a voracious reader, which grew into wanting to become a writer. Members of my nuclear family didn’t understand how anyone could find anything but drowsiness in a book, but my grandmother did. She was a creature with the same quiet habits.
My grandmother also had a rare, remarkable quality, even then: She spoke to me like I was an adult. She asked a lot of questions not because she needed to, but because she wanted to, and listened attentively to my reply. She was curious. At eight years old, I remember sitting on her bed and talking to her about World War II and what it was like for her to be a child during that era. She showed me ration stamps she kept from the 01940s and described the women of her life huddled around the family porch in the mountains, weaving and chatting about where their men could be right then in Europe. The resounding themes from my conversations with her always seemed to be about tolerance, despite differences in faith, color, or creed. Growing up in a time when intolerance defined her world left an enormous impression on her. Maybe she talked to me like an adult because she recalled understanding very adult things when she was just as small.
During my autumn visit, I realized that the sole figure in my life who had always mirrored my bookishness couldn’t hold one up and see it anymore. Thus, one afternoon we stood in front of her bookshelf and she plucked a paperback from the cherry-hued shelves and passed it to me. It was a copy of Chesapeake (01978) by James Michener, which was based on the Eastern Shore. I packed the weathered paperback and flew it to New Mexico. From the desert I seeped into a tale of my homeland I had never heard before: the Bay was the central character, except the narrative also featured Indigenous people seeing Europeans on their waterways for the first time. It featured Catholics fleeing England, Quakers running from Boston, pirates, ship-builders, slave-traders, fisherman, and the view of both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars from the Eastern Shore. When I visited Maryland again a few months later, my grandmother passed along more of her James Michener collection: Caribbean (01989), Poland (01983), Hawaii (01959), and Alaska (01988).
James Michener was born in Pennsylvania and raised a Quaker. He was decades older than my grandmother, yet they had a core fact in common: They were deeply touched by World War II. Michener was in his late thirties at the time with religious exemption but volunteered to go to the Pacific anyway. The experience of seeing the worst of humanity had everything to do with what came next: When he returned, he was staunch in his commitment to become a writer. It was like after the profundity of the war, there was no turning back:
“I never said I was going to be a great man because I had no idea what my capacities were. I had no great confidence; nothing in my background gave me a reason to think so. But I was not forestalled from acting as if I were. That is, deal with big subjects… Associate with people who are brighter than you are. Grapple with the problems of your time. And it was as clear to me as if a voice were telling me to do this: “This is the choosing-up point, kiddo, from here on.” I had no idea that life was as short as it is. That concept comes very late in any human life, I think. I thought life was immeasurable, extensive to the horizon and beyond. But I did know that my capacities were not unlimited. I had only so much to spend, and let’s do it in a big way. And I think that was all the difference.”
Throughout his career, Michener wrote dozens of books. The novels that my grandmother passed along to me rest at about a thousand pages apiece. Hawaii opens millions of years ago by describing how tectonic plates shifted to unleash the magma that formed the islands. A few million more years pass before a single, brave bird lands upon the rocky shore, empties its bowels, and releases the first seed onto the island. Caribbean opens similarly to Chesapeake in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the Indigenous peoples whose civilizations were intertwined with the respective lands. Poland opens with the Taters of Mongolia rushing an attack on Krakow with a stop in Kyiv that resulted in ancient violences. Looking at news coverage today, it reminds the reader that history keeps repeating itself.
Michener’s process for writing a book started with meticulous research. For Chesapeake, he lived in St. Michaels on the eastern shore of Maryland. For Poland, he commissioned more than twenty leading academics in the nation to draft papers outlining what topics in Polish history were top-of-mind for scholars. Tonally, the books are patient. They are not arrogant. Most characters have heaps of goodness and wretchedness as real people do. This commitment to dive deep and take on complex topics caused his books to lean into the glories and shames of a place, and that didn’t come without repercussions. It took bravery. Poland was written while the USSR was still intact. Some books were temporarily banned in the precise countries they were based on.
In the introduction of Hawaii, writer Steve Berry noted that in one of Michener’s interviews later in life, he acknowledged that his books couldn’t have been written in the modern era. He knew he was lucky to write at a time when people had the attention spans to support dense, demanding works. It paid off. His fans were loyal, like my grandmother. Most of all, when I pick up Poland and read it now, I know that the depictions of various regional forces, even while fictionalized, contain central tendrils of truth that get me closer to understanding what I want to in the world around me. And understanding what I wish to isn’t about one narrative steamrolling over another: It’s the mess of what constitutes truth. I worry for a future where art is created that finds the search for multifaceted, complex, unpopular truths to be too arduous or controversial and, instead, simply ignores it.
A few years ago, I decided to go about becoming a writer by entering the freelance writing industry. As a contractor, I build my own schedule and balance creative pursuits alongside professional ones. Despite that flexibility, I’m constantly confronted by the understanding that how fast I can write a pitch, make phone calls, draft copy, write interview questions, and whip a story together defines my survival as a writer. But for a working creative, that’s the name of the game. You can’t survive without doing so. And on the purely literary end of the spectrum, there is an insatiable hunger to achieve everything I can as fast as possible to get the attention of an audience before they get distracted again. All of that goes against the grain of taking the concentrated time to see the big picture and create based on not the immediacy of right now, but on a human heritage much larger than that.
Yet James Michener’s books put forth the argument that thinking in the wider context of place and time doesn’t just benefit you as an artist; in the right hands, it has the capacity to make a lasting impact on the world. Doing so requires writers to train themselves to become more methodical and less reactionary. It requires patience with ourselves, one another, and the effort to understand that a single action is, more often than not, not an anomaly: It's likely a part of a pattern that may stretch across continents and cultures and only be visible for full examination in another fifty, hundred, or thousand years.
Once, a cousin noted that a character flaw of my grandmother was that she was not reactive. It’s not untrue—my grandmother avoids conflict. Yet my grandmother’s wisdom is that she can sit and watch the strangeness and the backwardness of modern times accumulate without having a knee-jerk reaction. Instead, she reflects, tries to make sense of things, and sees them in a wider context of now versus the world she was raised in. How did it change? What has improved? What did she dream would shift that hasn’t? On our visits, she answers all of these questions for me patiently. It's that quality of seeking a bird’s eye view that, funny enough, is why I think she adored James Michener’s books. It’s a brand of wisdom that I’ve always coveted in everyone I’ve ever met and rarely find. Even my fiancé regrets only meeting my grandmother later in her life because he wishes he could have seen these traits and been shaped by them, too.
Understanding all I wish to takes time. Every so often, I wonder if I, or anyone else, should put forth their best attempts at writing, painting, or creating any art that reflects the culture of our time if patience is such a virtue. And the answer is yes. There is so much mystery in our world and understanding any corner of it takes concentrated, sustained attention. It takes diligence. It takes bravery. And perhaps with a bit of bravery, more ambitious works that require commitment will become a trend once again. I’m waiting for it, preparing for it, thinking about where I should set my energies to create something meaningful. I don’t know how much longer my grandmother will be with me, but I try to think of her when I don’t know what to do: What would she tell me? What questions would she ask? What questions should I ask?
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