Journey to the end of the Earth — Class 12 MCQs with Answers

Key concepts: Journey to the end of the Earth (Class 12 English)

Tishani Doshi's account of a voyage to Antarctica aboard the Akademik Shokalskiy with the Students on Ice programme. The essay reads the continent as a record of the earth's past — Gondwana — and as a warning about its future, closing with a walk on a metre of ice above 180 metres of ocean.

The voyage

Aboard the Russian research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy, heading for 'the coldest, driest, windiest continent in the world'. The journey began 13.09 degrees north of the Equator in Madras and crossed nine time zones, six checkpoints and three bodies of water.

Gondwana

Six hundred and fifty million years ago a giant amalgamated southern supercontinent existed, centred roughly around present-day Antarctica. The climate was much warmer and it hosted a huge variety of flora and fauna.

The break-up

Gondwana thrived for 500 million years, then separated around the time the dinosaurs were wiped out and the age of mammals began.

Geology you can see

India pushing north to buckle Asia's crust into the Himalayas; South America drifting off to open the Drake Passage, creating a cold circumpolar current that keeps Antarctica frigid.

The scale of the place

90 per cent of the earth's total ice volumes are stored there. It is 'like walking into a giant ping-pong ball devoid of any human markers — no trees, billboards, buildings', and you lose all earthly sense of perspective and time.

Midges to icebergs

The visual scale runs from midges and mites to blue whales and 'icebergs as big as countries (the largest recorded was the size of Belgium)', in a silence broken only by an avalanche or a calving ice sheet.

Human impact

Human civilisations have been around 'a paltry 12,000 years — barely a few seconds on the geological clock', and in that time the burning of fossil fuels has created 'a blanket of carbon dioxide around the world'.

Why Antarctica matters to the debate

It is the only place that has never sustained a human population, so it remains relatively 'pristine' — and it holds half-million-year-old carbon records in its ice-cores.

Students on Ice

Six years old at the time of writing, headed by Canadian Geoff Green, who tired of carting celebrities and rich curiosity-seekers 'who could only give back in a limited way'.

Why students

Green offers future policy-makers a life-changing experience 'at an age when they're ready to absorb, learn, and most importantly, act'. Seeing glaciers retreat makes the threat real.

The phytoplankton parable

The 'grasses of the sea' sustain the entire Southern Ocean food chain. Ozone depletion would hit them, and through them all marine animals, birds and the global carbon cycle: 'take care of the small things and the big things will fall into place'.

Walking on the ocean

Under their feet, 'a metre-thick ice pack, and underneath that, 180 metres of living, breathing, salt water'. The revelation: 'everything does indeed connect.'