Britannia Range: What The Maps Don’t Tell

Though it’s at the bottom of the world, the landscape of Antarctica as shown on Google Earth seems as close to the sky as one can get. Here and there, the Britannia Range crests in small rocky spurs, notching the horizon but never daring to fully intrude into the open air. The faint blue streaks that marr the ice give the slightest, uneasy sense of depth, but never clear or close enough to matter. It’s beyond our reach, beyond our caring, and however far down and away the mountains spread is a mystery. We see only the eroded peaks of them

The snow fans out around this modest cluster in every direction, smooth and white as new paper. There is nothing to say about this place – nothing Google Maps finds worthy of mention. But zooming close over the snowfields,you can see the faintest, sweeping shapes where the wind and jagged ice carved light currents over the surface, maps of current too faint us to notice.

It’s hard to speak of here and there when it’s all the same sky overhead, flat and featureless, and the same bleak ground. But where the Britannia Range wrinkles over the surface, the ice crumples and bunches like a cloth as it’s through the pass. What are the spiritless peaks of the Range to this pattern of currents written into the ice? The tracks of its movement seem to send the very sky rushing faster out to the sea. livening the blank sky and the meaningless plain into something starkly poignant.

Here, where the ice passes between the peaks, the two planes seem to mirror each other, the deeper blues fading into hard whites, blending into each other until the only distinction between them is the hard line of the horizon. The snow sweeps in cloud-like curves out to the sea while the sky presses down bare and cold as ice. It is a world of mirrors and subtlety and contradiction.

But then, they say there’s nothing here for us to see. The only thing they bothered naming was a huddle of wind-worn stones, no more than sooty spots on the map. There’s no mention of mirrored worlds or currents in the ice. Just a blank spot.

(Sorry, having some issues with the gallery. I can’t get rid of the doubles >_< )

One thought on “Britannia Range: What The Maps Don’t Tell

  1. Well written, Monica. The indistinguishable line between the snow/ice and the sky you describe would absolutely be considered the awe of the sublime. Good screen shots as well, though I would have like more details regarding your use of Google Earth and how experiencing a place digitally differs from a physical interaction.

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