
A black mass in a vacant quarter of ocean Ile aux Cochons belongs to the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, yet even in a territory defined by distance it stands apart. The island lies in the Crozet archipelago of the southern Indian Ocean, far from regular sea routes and far from settlement, a steep volcanic…

Few inhabited places on earth feel so provisional. In the southeastern reaches of the Svalbard archipelago, between the Barents Sea and the routes of weather moving out of the Arctic Ocean, Hopen Island lies long and narrow, a spare strip of rock and frozen ground about 33 kilometers in length and only a few kilometers…

Few places have altered what scholars know about the human Arctic as sharply as Zhokhov Island. Set in Russia’s High Arctic, in the De Long group of the East Siberian Sea, it lies far north of the Siberian mainland within the New Siberian archipelago, a piece of tundra and frozen ground exposed to one of…