A journey into Earth's past

In 'Journey to the end of the Earth', Tishani Doshi describes her journey to Antarctica. She travelled more than 100 hours from Madras, crossing nine time zones, six checkpoints, three bodies of water and at least three ecospheres, and boarded a Russian research ship, the 'Akademik Shokalskiy', heading for the coldest, driest, windiest continent in the world.

Antarctica is a vast white world. Its huge spaces, its silence and its uninterrupted horizon fill her with wonder.

Going there is also a journey into the Earth's past. About 650 million years ago, India and Antarctica were part of one giant southern supercontinent, Gondwana. It was warm then, and full of plants and animals; humans had not yet appeared.

Gondwana slowly broke up. India drifted north and pushed into Asia: the collision crumpled the land and raised the Himalayas. South America drifted off to join North America, opening up the Drake Passage, and Antarctica was left alone at the bottom of the world, where it froze.

Today Antarctica holds about 90 per cent of the Earth's total ice. In the southern summer, the sun shines for twenty-four hours a day, and the silence is so deep that it is broken only by the occasional avalanche or the cracking of ice.