My favourite quote of the season comes from Tracy Rogers, a marine ecologist who sometime today will be winched from the research vessel the Akademik Shokalskiy and rescued by helicopter. ‘I love it when the ice wins and we don’t,’ she says. ‘It reminds you that as humans we don’t control everything and that the natural world is the winner here.’
The unintended irony is delicious. If the winner of the fiasco which has been developing in the Antarctic over the past two weeks is the natural world there is little disguising who the losers are, even if, as I suspect, Tracy Rogers can’t quite see it. She and her fellow passengers are on an expedition led by Chris Turney, professor of climate change at the University of New South Wales, to retrace a voyage made by Douglas Mawson a century ago. That Turney has taken a large number of paying passengers along, and is also entertaining reporters from the BBC and the Guardian suggests that this is not simply an experiment but a publicity stunt, too.
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