MIGHTY BAD LAND

Luyendyk’s memoir recounts a geological expedition to the “pure wilderness” of Antarctica's Marie Byrd Land.

The Marie Byrd Land region of Antarctica is one of the most remote territories on the planet, a “pure wilderness experienced by few humans” that has earned the nickname Mighty Bad Land. For six weeks in late 1989 and early 1990, the author, a geology professor, experienced it as the leader of a six-person scientific expedition, encountering enough challenges to satisfy even the most demanding fans of nonfiction adventure. In Marie Byrd Land, “zero degrees Fahrenheit is a warm day, grandeur stirs disbelief, and in summer, there is no night,” he writes in his engaging account of the expedition. The goal of the enterprise was to investigate, through the analysis of rock samples, how the southern “supercontinent” of Gondwana split apart. To that end, Luyendyk and his team endured an eight-hour flight in a Hercules transport aircraft to the McMurdo Station on Antarctica’s Ross Island, where they spent two weeks preparing to “unearth the secrets of Marie Byrd Land.” The author is particularly adept at evoking the privations of Antarctic life—a McMurdo building “reminded me of a down-market ski resort,” while a colony of penguins “stunk like old fish.” The team’s sojourn into the eerie emptiness of Marie Byrd Land included such mishaps as one member’s falling 100 feet into an ice crevasse—“I almost died,” he told Luyendyk—and some tense interpersonal dynamics. Luyendyk struggles with his own demons, fretting over his “weight of responsibility” as expedition leader: “I felt frightened often, more than I expected, and anxious,” he later tells his therapist. There is some padding that weighs down the book, as the author re-creates every planning discussion with his colleagues, and lay readers may find the level of geological detail—as when the team members get into an argument about “anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility”—somewhat intimidating. But the journey is mostly a memorable one, leaving no doubt that, “In Antarctica, nothing’s under control.”

Vividly details the harshness and hazards of life in a “land of hypnotic chaos.”