Summary of Barry H. Lopez's Arctic Dreams , livre ebook

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50 pages

English

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I stood on the frozen ocean 20 miles off Cape Mamen, Mackenzie King Island, and looked at the moon reflected in the sea ice. The sky had no depth because of the fullness of the moon, but stars shone brightly.
#2 The Arctic was seen as an inhospitable place by the Old World, but by the Greeks it was a land of rich lacustrine soils, gentle breezes, and fecund animals. The inhabitants of Hyperborea were thought to be the oldest of the human races and to be comparable with the land itself.
#3 The North Magnetic Pole is located at 77°N 120°W, some 30 miles east of Edmund Walker Island in the southern end of the Findlay Group. The North Geomagnetic Pole, around which the earth’s magnetic field and its magnetosphere are theoretically arranged, lies about 500 miles east of the North Magnetic Pole in northern Greenland.
#4 The sun’s arctic movement is difficult to understand because our thought about it has been fixed for tens of thousands of years. We don’t think in three dimensions, and it is difficult to imagine the sun’s arctic movement because our minds have been trained to understand the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

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Polar region

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Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	25 mars 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781669364214
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Insights on Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I stood on the frozen ocean 20 miles off Cape Mamen, Mackenzie King Island, and looked at the moon reflected in the sea ice. The sky had no depth because of the fullness of the moon, but stars shone brightly.

#2

The Arctic was seen as an inhospitable place by the Old World, but by the Greeks it was a land of rich lacustrine soils, gentle breezes, and fecund animals. The inhabitants of Hyperborea were thought to be the oldest of the human races and to be comparable with the land itself.

#3

The North Magnetic Pole is located at 77°N 120°W, some 30 miles east of Edmund Walker Island in the southern end of the Findlay Group. The North Geomagnetic Pole, around which the earth’s magnetic field and its magnetosphere are theoretically arranged, lies about 500 miles east of the North Magnetic Pole in northern Greenland.

#4

The sun’s arctic movement is difficult to understand because our thought about it has been fixed for tens of thousands of years. We don’t think in three dimensions, and it is difficult to imagine the sun’s arctic movement because our minds have been trained to understand the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

#5

If you could travel south along the 100th meridian, toward Mexico City, you would notice that the sun’s path is tilted. The tilt becomes more and more pronounced as you walk south. If you stood at the North Pole six months later, on December 21, the winter solstice, the middle of the polar night, you would not see a single star set.

#6

The Arctic is like the desert in that it is open, unobstructed country lit well enough by a full moon to permit travel at night. The winter darkness is only relieved by periods of twilight, which are common in the Arctic.

#7

The North is a completely different world from the South. It is a land of cold, dark winters, and endless, sunlit summers. The land seems to have run out of the stuff of life, and there are few niches for animals to occupy. But there are niches, and they are occupied by animals that are completely and comfortably at home in them.

#8

The soil is a living system that is created by erosion, fracture, and the secretion of organic acids. It is inhabited by hundreds of creatures, from nematodes to mites to springtails. The soil changes in depth and quality as you go north.

#9

The seasons are associated in our minds with the growth of vegetation. Outside of the four primary seasons, we speak of a growing season and a fallow season, when we picture the earth lying dormant. In the middle of an arctic winter, however, there is no feeling of growth.

#10

The growth of trees in the Arctic is constrained by several factors. Lack of light for photosynthesis is one, but warmth is another. Arctic trees need heat to survive, and there is a strong correlation between warmth and closeness to the ground.

#11

The animals and plants of the Arctic must adjust to a seasonal way of life. The most salient, overall adaptive strategy of arctic organisms is their ability to enter a frozen state or a state of very low metabolic activity whenever temperatures drop, and then to resume full metabolic activity when it warms sufficiently.

#12

The northern ecosystems are the oldest ones on earth, and they are also the most stable. They are characterized by a special kind of biological stability not found in the North. The rate of biological evolution in the North is much slower than in the South.

#13

The arctic is an ecosystem that is inherently vulnerable. It is a cold, light-poor desert, and it has few species because so few have metabolic processes or patterns of growth that can adapt to such little light.

#14

The Arctic is home to many animals that seem to defy the harsh winter climate. However, these are summer concentrations, and when the rivers and seas freeze over in September, they will all be gone.

#15

When I met a collared lemming on a summer day, I took its stare. I thought: Well, there is a fox over there, or a wolverine. Maybe a bear. He’d better be careful. The ground squirrel left, and I went over to the draw beyond the rock but could find no tracks.

#16

I often thought about animal behavior and the threads of evolution in the Arctic. I wondered where the animals had come from, and where we had come from. The Arctic ecosystem is only 10,000 years old, which makes it young compared to other ecosystems on earth.

#17

The first wisdom that distinguished us as a species grew out of an intimacy with the earth, and it seemed impossible to me that we could ever lose that. I wanted to enquire among these people, for what we now decide to do in the North has a certain frightening irrevocability about it.

#18

I lay on the caribou skins that evening, and I thought about the wisdom that each culture holds. I wondered if we had come all this way only to be betrayed by our own technologies.

#19

The arctic is home to many species of animals that maintain a 24-hour rhythm. Some, however, are able to sync their rhythms with the sun and the moon.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

I came to Banks Island to watch muskoxen. The muskox is one of the few large animals that has survived the ice ages in North America. The tundra is its habitat, and it is completely adapted to a polar existence.

#2

I was sitting in the tundra, sketching the muskoxen in the valley to the south, when I heard the alarm call of a sandhill crane. To the southwest, an arctic hare rose up immediately. To the southeast, a snowy owl pivoted its head far around.

#3

The story of the camp began in the previous century. In September 1851, Captain Robert M’Clure was guiding HMS Investigator along the north coast of Banks Island, desperate for relief from the press of heavy ice in the strait later named for him. Toward the island’s eastern cape, he found a shallow, protected embayment. They overwintered there.

#4

The Eskimos likely traveled lightly on their annual excursions to Mercy Bay, saving space on their small sleds and inside dog panniers for salvaged materials. They drove the muskoxen out of the sedge meadows along the river and up onto hilltops where they turned to make a stand. The hunters shot them with copper- and iron-tipped arrows.

#5

The recovery of the muskoxen on Banks Island is a reminder that human involvement with wild animals is biologically and economically complicated. Hunting wild animals to the point of extinction is a very old story.

#6

The Pleistocene extinction, which was the die-off of large mammals that began about 18,000 years ago in North America, was caused by man. The land had dried up, and the composition and distribution of plant life had changed radically.

#7

The Eskimo hunters on Kuptana Island are trying to adapt to an unorthodox economics. They are trying to protect their cash income from their trap lines, and they want to get rid of muskoxen to ensure a good supply of caribou meat.

#8

When I stood up and looked out over the valley, I felt the tremendous depth of time. The first muskoxen I ever saw were on a research farm outside Fairbanks, Alaska. They were small, adroit, and kept close to each other in a patch of spruce trees.

#9

The muskox is the only surviving relative of the takin, a calflike animal of ponderous build with a bulging snout like a saiga antelope’s. It has a single living relative, the takin of northern Tibet.

#10

The muskox is an animal with a musky smell. Its guard hair is extremely dense, and it grows down from the throat. Its underfur is extremely soft and warm, and it sheds it in patches between May and mid-July.

#11

The muskox’s unique, characteristic horns suggest a cape buffalo’s, but they curve down close to the cheeks before hooking out and up in a recurved point. The female’s horns are shorter and more slender. They also taper more sharply than the male’s and do not grow together, helmetlike, in a boss over the skull.

#12

The muskox is a unique species that is very nimble and sure-footed.