"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 is 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 Transantarctic Mountains than any other person on Earth, this geologist is uniquely suited to offer this stunning visual tour of Antarctica. With stories of Stump's journeys and science, the book contains some 130 color photographs from his 40 years of work on the world's most isolated continent, all complemented by watercolors and sketches by scientific illustrator 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 Mt. Erebus, and traverse Liv Glacier on snowmobile, while avoiding fatal falls into hidden crevasses. Along the way, we see the beauty of granite, marble, and ice-cored moraines, meltwater ponds, lenticular clouds, icebergs and glaciers. All seems both permanent and precarious, connecting this otherworld to our fragile own"-- Provided by publisher.