Book breathtaking and informative

The Ice, to New Zealanders, means Antarctica. The ice fringe of this once-mysterious place was sighted by none other than James Cook in January 1773, on his second great circumnavigation of the world (1772-1775). Few locals will not have visited the memorial above Port Chalmers, the port from which Robert Falcon Scott and his team sailed fatefully in 1910 to the unforgiving environment. Many will recall the tragic significance of Mount Erebus, towering 3794m above Ross Island.

Fascination means attraction.

Veronika Meduna is fascinated by the Antarctic. Her two visits there since 2001 underpin a work reflecting clearly her twin skills as a life scientist and science journalist.

Inevitably, a modern book about the frozen continent is packed with breathtaking but also highly informative photographs, many of them supplied from generously acknowledged sources. Detailed history, geology and biology are explained with that matter-of-factness, questioning of detail and search for the human dimension characteristic of the professional writer.

Primordial Antarctica was once located in warmer latitudes, as a part of Gondwanaland, before the land mass migrated by continental drift to its polar position. Geological signs and the fossils of plants and animals, including vertebrates, provide clear evidence of abundant temperate life about 200 million years ago. Life is still abundant there, but necessarily adapted for survival in the marginal conditions.

Antarctic seawater, because of its salt, remains liquid down to -2.3degC.

That's not so very cold, a lot warmer than many a frosty Central Otago morning. Penguins, which spend much of their time in the water, and sea mammals have mechanisms to generate internal heat and the insulation to minimise its loss. Fish do not, however, and therefore have a problem, because at a degree or so below zero their blood and body fluids should freeze solid, stopping their circulation and killing them. How do Antarctic fish avoid this happening?

The evolutionary answer, partly, has been to adapt their blood proteins to a type covered in carbohydrates, giving them anti-freeze properties just sufficient to keep their blood liquid.

The land environment can be vastly colder than the sea, usually colder than -25degC (already colder than a freezer) and in places as low as -80degC. Oddly enough, the Antarctic is very dry, with relatively little precipitation and a dehydrated atmosphere, and there is a certain amount of exposed soil. Life is therefore exposed to both dehydration and freezing. It's reasonably intuitive that spores, bacteria and microscopic organisms stand the best chances of regenerating after a freeze-dried dormancy. But higher organisms?

Antarctic tardigrades, very small mite-like creatures, have found a way.

So have tiny nematodes, which are extremely common in the biosphere, many as rather unpleasant parasites of animals and plants. World-leading research at the University of Otago is continuing to uncover the tricks adopted by some of these species to survive the twin stresses of dehydration and freezing. As the lethal damage done when an organism freezes solid is largely the result of ice crystal formation, the ability to survive dehydration first is an obvious advantage.

Modern research to trace these survival mechanisms back to specific genes looks like keeping Antarctic scientists busy for years.

• Clive Trotman is a Dunedin arbitrator and science presenter.