Where the Earth Meets the Sky
with Louise K. Blight
Hosted by David McGuffin
“Stunning. Part love story for the wildest place on Earth, part meditation on what we’ve lost, Louise Blight combines a scientist’s clarity and rigour with an artist’s appreciation of landscape and language to create a hauntingly beautiful depiction of her season studying Adélie penguins at a remote Antarctic field station.”
SCIENCE SATURDAY: Join our host, Canadian Geographic’s David McGuffin, for a conversation with Louise K. Blight, author of Where the Earth Meets the Sky.
Antarctica is a land of extremes. It is the coldest, windiest and most inaccessible part of our planet—and now one of the places most affected by climate change. In this moving and personal narrative, conservation biologist Louise K. Blight recounts her summer studying Adélie penguins with one of the world’s great Antarctic scientists. On isolated Ross Island, from which legendary explorers Sir Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott attempted to reach the South Pole, Louise and pioneering penguin biologist David Ainley document how the region’s penguins are being affected by the world’s largest-ever iceberg. The iceberg’s impact is geological in scope and life-changing for the tens of thousands of breeding penguins rushing to mate and rear their young.
Blending polar travelogue, science and natural history, Where the Earth Meets the Sky is a story about a female scientist navigating Antarctica’s extreme conditions and quirky human subculture. It is a story about how the world’s most unforgiving environment has shaped the psyches of Antarctica’s human visitors, past and present—and how nature can heal the human soul.
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