A decade ago, novelist and short-story writer Jean McNeil spent a year as writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey, and four months on the world’s most enigmatic continent—Antarctica. Access to the Antarctic remains largely reserved for scientists, and it is the only piece of earth that is nobody’s country. Ice Diaries is the story of McNeil’s years spent in ice, not only in the Antarctic but her subsequent travels to Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard, culminating in a strange event in Cape Town, South Africa, where she journeyed to make what was to be her final trip to the southernmost continent.

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It was Simon, the base commander that summer at Base R, who first told me about it. A strange little book was tucked away in the base library, he said, a list of all the different forms of ice, written for mariners, in the tradition of the identification manuals carried on ships: those glossaries of knots, or wind, or seafaring terms.

I’d encountered ice terms on the ship, a lollipop red-and-white polar research vessel which had conveyed us to the end of the world: I knew about frost flowers, polynyas, growlers—all words for the kinds of ice you encounter at sea, and had taken an instant shine to these gnarled, revelatory terms. How many more kinds of ice could there be?

After some rummaging in the dustless library (no mites means no dust—the Antarctic is heaven for neat freaks), I found the book. It was a thin paperback with stiff blue paper covers, worn but not “foxed,” as they say in the book trade—those singed edges and brown liver spots which accumulate around the edges of papers and bindings—because there was no moisture in the air to fox them.

A Glossary of Ice Terms. The text was typed out in the blocky Courier of old typewriters. Ablation, black ice, candle ice, first-year ice, frazil ice, glass ice, growler, hummock, ice gruel, pressure ice, rotten ice, sastrugi, serac, stamukha, tarn, winter ice. The glossary listed over sixty ice words, in English. (There was a separate annex for Greenlandic terms.) There would be more to learn about ice than I had thought.

I signed the book out of the library using the outmoded index card system—a certain John Struthers’s name, with the date 1978 and a book named God’s Mammoth Tasks still shone in bright blue ink on the register, as if it had been signed only that morning. The slim ice glossary sat on my desk in the two offices I was assigned, Lab 7 and Lab 5, during the months I was in the Antarctic; by the time I left I had memorized the contents as you would conjugate verbs, committing to memory a language I never expected would be mine.

Ice has a life cycle, just as we do. We talk of it being born when an iceberg calves from a glacier, of its living and its dying when it melts. But actually ice is immortal; it never quite dies but is reincarnated, through melt, into water, into vapour.

The Antarctic is by far the largest accumulation of ice on the earth. The Ice, as the continent is sometimes referred to—a term of affection—is, along with Greenland, the most complete frozen archive of our planet’s past. It is also an oracle, however reluctant or accidental. Through the chemical residues it traps, ice provides a precise record of the atmospheric past, and in particular how the planet has responded to past episodes of warming and cooling. Through analyzing this data, scientists become augurers: they can offer a likely scenario of how climate cycles and gaseous emissions will affect the future temperature of the planet.

Ice has also long been associated with another kind of divination: crystallomancy. The crystal itself has been used for future-telling through what in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was called scrying—looking into an object to divine a likely outcome. If we peered into it, mystics of the era believed, ice would reveal our future. Whether molecular or esoteric, ice promises revelation.

In the last ice age, the great ice sheets of the northern hemisphere were called the Laurentide, Fennoscandian, and Greenlandic and, in the southern hemisphere, the West and East Antarctic sheets. Of these, only Greenland and the Antarctic still exist. We remain in an ice age, but in a phase called an interglacial, when the ice sheets do not advance. This is an important point: shrinkage is not the key to an interglacial, rather lack of expansion is. So it has been for much of the planet’s history. The next ice age was expected to begin sometime in the next ten thousand years, due to naturally occurring cyclotherms—subtle alterations in the Earth’s temperature. But now for the first time in the planet’s long history, this natural cycle has been disrupted by man, and it is possible the polar ice sheets which wait so patiently for expansion may never again begin their advance. The Antarctic Peninsula, where I was based for several months, is an apt place to contemplate this interruption; the peninsula is the fastest-warming landmass in the world; at 2.5 degrees Celsius each year, it is heating up at approximately six times the global average rate.

The realm of ice is a mysterious world, underpinned by several persistent and little-publicized scientific mysteries, even conundrums. Before I went to Antarctica I knew little of the cryosphere, that sphere not of tears but of ice, apart from having grown up in a cold, still-glacial landscape. People from my background—North American welfare class—do not generally go to the Antarctic, or at least not the British Antarctic, and certainly not as writers. I had never dreamed of going there. The majority of people who go to Antarctica are scientists who work in the cryospheric disciplines: glaciology, oceanography, marine biology, terrestrial biology, atmospheric chemistry, physics, and astronomy, along with the engineers, technicians, mountaineers, pilots, and mariners who support the science programme on the frozen continent and who are the modern-day equivalent of polar explorers, carrying their cold studs of knowledge of the fickleness of ice, the harshness of the light, the topsy-turvy world which awaits there, where all your expectations and beliefs of how the planet ought to behave are overturned as the sun performs strange revolutions in the sky.

In the years I have spent teetering between the tips of the world since my first trip to the Antarctic, years spent in spells in Greenland, Svalbard, Iceland, Norway, the Falkland Islands, or shuttling between them on ocean-going research ships, everyone—scientists, seamen, pilots, electricians alike—has spoken of Antarctica’s unique cultish allure. “Once you’ve lived there for any period of time, you can’t get the place out of your head,” Tim, an eloquent English builder I met on base, told me. The Antarctic has been described by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally as not so much a physical place as “another state of being.” The white tractor beam it exerts upon the consciousness of people who have been there, pulling them back, operates on a power beyond its obvious allures—its cold charisma, its pristine wildness.

Could the lump of rock and ice that ballasts our planet at the bottom have qualities nowhere else on earth possesses? Could it be something akin to a consciousness? There, I felt the press of an external consciousness on mine, and not for the first time; as it turns out I had felt it as a child growing up in a cold corner of Canada’s eastern seaboard, but had forgotten it.

Ice Diaries completes my trio of books on the polar regions. It is not a systematic account or explanation of the phenomenon of climate change or of the science behind it—other books, some of which I quote here, have done that far better. It is a less ambitious artifact: a witness statement, a travel narrative and a diary of a journey to the most inaccessible of the seven continents. It is also a study in the thermodynamics of our lives. Like the earth we also pass through cycles of cold, hot, and the middling temperate zones in between. Some years are spent in a cryogenic slumber. Some are incendiary and dissolve everything we thought was real—our homes, partners, families. How we weather these personal climate changes may determine the course of our lives.

Memoirs thrive on an overheated currency of self-transformation along the lines of I was profoundly changed by this experience. I’m not sure I can deliver on that promise with this book. Although I do go excavating for signs of change in my life, even as I live it; writers are avid archaeologists of the present. I find that after years in the polar regions my inner landscape is an altered state. Things flourish in cold in a way they would never do in heat; you have made a career out of your sadness; I don’t say goodbye, I don’t look back; we aren’t, after all, very good at imagining the future: these are more than phrases uttered by those I met in Antarctica —they have a capacious intent to their tight explanations. They mean more than they appear to. They haunt me, still, which is a way of saying they have stayed with me, without resolution.

What is it about journeys? Aristotle said it best: “In the beginning, everything is possible. In the middle, one or two outcomes are likely. The end is inevitable.” Aristotle was writing about narrative, rather than travel, but the two have much in common. A journey has a clean narrative arc that most of our lives—those 25,000 or so days between the gaunt endpoints of birth and death—lack. There is a beginning, and an end, and in between is what happens.

But journeys are not so simple, in my experience.

My seven-year-long journey through ice was dogged by the future. During these years, in a way that would come to a dramatic culmination, I became more alert to what was going to happen. I took up scrying of a sort, and entered into the perilous world of trying to read the intentions of the future. I learned human beings cannot take the future, just as they cannot absorb much truth. The future and the truth are inexplicably intertwined, I discovered, so that they might be the same substance.

At the same time, the polar ice caps have become synonymous with a particular vision of the future: of human civilization ruined, or at the very least profoundly altered, by climate change.

I thought I knew extreme cold from a hardscrabble upbringing on Canada’s eastern seaboard. I thought about those years as little as possible; it was as if they had never happened. In going to the Antarctic, I believed I was journeying to a completely different place. The only thing it would have in common with my early life was that it would be cold. I might remember how to put on snow boots after fifteen winters in balmy England; I might have the advantage of knowing the signs of frostbite and how to prevent it. But that would be it. I was going to the Antarctic less as an individual with a past than as a writer, an official envoy from the future, to see what I would make of it.

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS)/Arts Council England International Artists and Writers residencies existed from 1998 until 2010; I was lucky enough to be part of this programme, which sent many talented visual artists, and a few writers, to the continent. We didn’t have to sign a contract or otherwise pledge what we would do. We were understood to be witnesses.

The expectation was that our resulting work would further the public communication of science, and in particular, of climate change science. We would make abstract entities and numbers appreciable to a more general audience than scientists could reach, through humanizing and personalizing them. People would care more: about science, about the polar regions, about climate change. As the English nature writer Robert Macfarlane has written, “We will not save what we do not love.”

This undoubtedly happened, through the work of the writers and artists who were deployed to the continent. But writers are unreliable communicators. They bristle when told what they must say, what they should see.

Not that BAS did, to its credit. The fault is with the sensibility of the writer. We automatically set about sabotaging the official line, consciously or unconsciously, even when it barely exists. We can’t resist it, because one of the tasks of being a writer is to examine reality as it is shipped to us, preordered and prefabricated, for our consumption: what I call “consensus reality”—what everyone agrees, for convenience’s sake, will be real. But look underneath the surface of the moment, and you find a roiling tension, not unlike the southern Atlantic Ocean in autumn and winter: a dynamic conflict so complete and vast it is hard to believe it remains intact. We are constantly on the verge of being torn apart by our realizations, and that is one reason why we deny them. This book dramatizes what many readers may think of as science, but actually the science—information, observation—is indivisible in my mind from what actually happened, and what I felt. They are a single entity, like water, or even ice. To not have the science would condemn this book to solipsism. In Antarctica, information, experience, and endeavour are welded together; the Antarctic is a giant outdoor laboratory.

Apart from a few high-priced tourist adventures, the continent is completely dedicated to science. Science is a way of seeing things clearly, a process of revelation. A writer tries to see things clearly too, to perceive immutable truths that lie beneath the surface of the decoy we take to be reality. This can be an act of revelation but also of sabotage, because it might upset other vested interests in curating the truth. To discover these truths, things normally concealed—to the self as much as to others—must be brought to light. In the Antarctic I first learned that the original meaning of apocalypse (apokalupsis in Greek) is to uncover, to reveal.

I did learn a great deal about the science of climate change in Antarctica. However, climate is a flexible concept, and the book is an exploration of an inner as much as an outer landscape, and an account of the emotional effect of my rediscovery of winter that year—in essence, a kind of self-ambush. There is a winter of the heart, and winter of the mind, and these can be more chilly than any external temperature you might encounter. This book probes winter as a concept and an experience. Now that I live for part of each year in a tropical monoseason on Kenya’s Indian Ocean, it seems to me a necessary season, a fallow lying-in, of regeneration and renewal of trust. Winter people are resolute and resourceful. We need these qualities to get us through lean times.

I do miss winter, the season of snow and ice, and the inner fortitude it summons. We could all learn from its austere glamour. What follows is an account of a life spent in ice of one description or another, and what my fascination with cold has bequeathed to me, and to the people who made me, as well as an account of a voyage of discovery—not of new lands or riches, but an interior lucre I was about to discover for myself: how the mind, the imagination, and the heart can be set on fire by ice.