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CYCLE OF FIRE
STEPHEN J. PYNE
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Antarctica drifted only slightly poleward. Its deteriorating climate, which culminated in its colossal ice field, was the product of its singular isolation around the South Pole. As the other Gondwanic plates deserted it, as its connections to other continental masses were removed, Antarctica acquired new patterns of circulation that made it not only cold, but wet. Precipitation fell in what had been a continental desert. Snow became ice, ice created more ice, and the entire continent evolved into a slab of glacial ice so immense that it deformed the shape of the planet. Its ice was ruthless, final, deathly. The ancestral biota it once shared with much of Gondwana failed, without replacement. In the ice of Antarctica, life all but vanished. Its ice, too, repelled humans.
Its Gondwanic twin, Australia, took an antithetical direction. Australia became steadily isolated because of its own positive plate motion, not merely the relative movement of the plates around it. Those travels, however, took Australia into the Pacific, away from the other continents; only to the north, where its edges ground against a submerged Asian plate, did it reestablish contact, and then with the upheaved islands of the Sunda arc; and as often as not even that land linkage was lost to deep channels and rising sea levels. As Australia entered the tropics, new circulation patterns not only raised its overall temperature but introduced aridity—seasonal, secular, selective. Aridity promoted the scleromorphs, and the scleromorphs brought fire. Where Antarctica was progressively informed by ice, Australia was increasingly shaped by fire. Rock had turned to dust, and dust to ash.
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