Other editions of book The Crystal Desert

THE CRYSTAL DESERT: SUMMERS IN ANTARCTICA is the story of life's tenacity on the coldest of Earth's continents. It tells of the explorers who discovered Antarctica, of the whalers and sealers who despoiled it, and of the scientists who are deciphering its mysteries. In beautiful, lucid prose, David G. Campbell chronicles the desperately short summers on the Antarctic Peninsula. He presents a fascinating portrait of the evolution of life in Antarctica and also of the evolution of the continent itself.

THE CRYSTAL DESERT: SUMMERS IN ANTARCTICA is the story of life's tenacity on the coldest of Earth's continents. It tells of the explorers who discovered Antarctica, of the whalers and sealers who despoiled it, and of the scientists who are deciphering its mysteries. In beautiful, lucid prose, David G. Campbell chronicles the desperately short summers on the Antarctic Peninsula. He presents a fascinating portrait of the evolution of life in Antarctica and also of the evolution of the continent itself.

THE CRYSTAL DESERT: SUMMERS IN ANTARCTICA is the story of life's tenacity on the coldest of Earth's continents. It tells of the explorers who discovered Antarctica, of the whalers and sealers who despoiled it, and of the scientists who are deciphering its mysteries. In beautiful, lucid prose, David G. Campbell chronicles the desperately short summers on the Antarctic Peninsula. He presents a fascinating portrait of the evolution of life in Antarctica and also of the evolution of the continent itself.

The author, David Campbell, is a marine biologist and currently Henry R. Luce Professor of Nations and the Global Environment at Grinnell College. The Crystal Desert was written after he spent three summers at the Brazilian research station, Comandante Ferraz, located on King George Island in the South Shetland Islands, 200 km north of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. In this area of Antarctica, he studied the life cycles of parasites that live in seals, fish, and crustaceans.This book is about living for a summer in that Antarctic outpost.

The Crystal Desert is not only the most eloquent book ever written about Antarctic but one of the best portraits of a place ever published. Most books about Antarctica have focuses on the lifeless ice cap that smothers two-thirds of the continent and on the heroic marches toward the South Pole that have pitted humans against a frozen world. The Crystal Desert is about the other Antarctica, the "banana belt" of the Antarctic Peninsula. The interior of the peninsula is biological haiku: a few eloquent syllables of plants and animals. The tallest plant is a lichen ten centimeters high, the largest land animal a flightless midge tow millimeters long. But the sea surrounding the peninsula brims with life like no other on Earth. The Crystal Desert is a story of life's tenacity in this coldest and most alien of continents. It is a chronicle of events - of courtship, hatching, birth, growth, predation, and death - during the desperately short summer, when for three months the sun marches around the northern horizon and sets only briefly.