Author Katie Hale on why every trip to Antarctica should inspire action

As the ship pulled away from the dock, I considered what lay before me: the darkening calm of the Beagle Channel, the terrifying swell of the Drake Passage, and then, glittering like a prize, Antarctica. This was a journey sparked 20 years earlier, by a school geography project. Cutting out magazine photographs of penguins and whales to stick on my ‘All About Antarctica’ poster, I’d felt something kindle inside me.

I’d imagined sun-carved icebergs, vast and glittering, with penguins porpoising in their lee. There would be seals basking on ice floes, and albatrosses riding updrafts on their colossal wings; big-bellied humpbacks breaching the surface. It was an ecological paradise, free from human interference.

And now here I was, on the deck of MS Fram (named after the legendary expedition ship used by Norwegian explorers Fridtjof Nansen and then Roald Amundsen), embarking on the voyage south — and a new novel.

The Edge of Solitude tells the story of Ivy — a disgraced 75-year-old environmental activist. Desperate to redeem her reputation, and so to salvage her relationship with her son, she offers her services to a billionaire’s controversial Antarctic conservation project. Like mine, Ivy’s journey begins in Ushuaia, the world’s most southerly city, at the tip of Argentina. Fin del mundo. The end of the world, she says, is the beginning of everything.

But as Ivy journeys further south, she must wrestle with her past mistakes, her ambition and what she owes the natural world around her. Like me, Ivy encounters the haunting beauty of icebergs drifting in the channels, the still black water with grease ice suspended below its surface like tiny translucent jellyfish, and the creaks and cracks of glaciers tumbling to the shore. She marvels at penguins and seals and breaching whales. But Antarctica is far from an untouched paradise.

My final landing was on Deception Island: a natural harbour in the caldera of a volcano. The Fram arrived when the island was thick with morning fog. Geothermal steam flurried along the black-sand beach, where I followed a trio of gentoo penguins waddling along the shore. From the blanketing white, skewed structures emerged: towering vertical boilers, vast russet tanks for storing blubber, simple crosses of grave markers — all remnants of the whaling industry that thrived here in the first half of the 20th century. Looming so unexpectedly — like a face watching from a dark window in a house you thought was empty — the structures were an eerie reminder of human presence so far south.

Once I started to notice it, human presence was everywhere, from the research huts painted with national flags to the tourism industry itself, and the changing climate’s effects on Antarctica’s topography. According to NASA, Antarctica is losing over 135 billion tonnes of ice mass per year. It is a continent that hangs in the balance of global politics.

In 1959, the Antarctic Treaty was created to ensure the continent would become ‘a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science’. The treaty relies on global cooperation, and I want to believe in its longevity — that Antarctica will remain a continent dedicated to science, nature and the furthering of human understanding. And for the most part, I do. Even in small ways on board the Fram, we were encouraged to engage with IAATO (International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators) and the Antarctic Ambassadors programme, and to participate in citizen science projects such as Happywhale, where individuals upload photographs of whale flukes to help identify the marine mammals.

But the rusting tanks and refineries of Deception Island suggest an alternative story: one of Antarctic industry and ecological destruction for the sake of profit. While I was awed by the sight of bow-riding humpbacks and penguin colonies glimpsed through blizzarding snow, it’s the human aspect of Antarctica — human aspiration and human folly — that makes for interesting fiction. This is the story I chose to explore.

Antarctica will always feel adventurous — the lure of the sea, the drama of the ice — but it is also a place for reflection. A place for wrestling with the mistakes of the past, and for weighing our own human desires alongside our capacity for stewardship and redemption. The Edge of Solitude takes place following the hypothetical collapse of the Antarctic Treaty. Ivy is faced with the long human history of destruction. On Deception Island as in the book, Antarctica is a place where everything — from individual integrity to global politics and ecology — feels at stake.

The Edge of Solitude by Katie Hale is published by Canongate Books, £16.99.