The Ice

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Stephen J. Pyne. The Ice

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CYCLE OF FIRE

Stephen J. Pyne

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A Plastic Art: The Esthetics of Icebergs

Ice is a plastic art. No other object more fully challenges the theory and practice of esthetics. The journey of the ice from crystal to berg is not simply a story of matter and motion: it is an esthetic journey of the first magnitude. And of all Antarctic ices the berg is the most artful. It contains all the stuff, the shapes, and the motions of other Antarctic ice, yet it combines them uniquely and it mounts them, like a set jewel, in an environment that enhances their effects. To James Eights, first naturalist to land on the continent, the icebergs were “in a peculiar manner, adapted to create feelings of awe and admiration in the bosom of the beholder, not alone from the majesty of their size, but likewise, by the variety of the forms and ever changing hues that they assume.”1 To veteran Antarctic explorer and scholar Frank Debenham, the bergs were “of all the natural features of the Antarctic the most strange and impressive.”2

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