Antarctica and the Arctic Circle: A Geographic Encyclopedia of the Earth's Polar Regions

摘要

This new encyclopaedia, reviewed here in its e-book version but running to two volumes in print, presents a geographic examination of the features, cultures, fauna and geopolitics of the two Terran Polar Regions. It opens with a short preface which provides an overview to the contents of the work, accompanied by a short introductory essay by the editor, setting the scene admirably. Notably, two maps of the regions appear here and, for reasons discussed later, these were resources I returned to repeatedly. There is also a brief event timeline, which at first glance appears to run from the Mesozoic to modern day, but actually is only really of value from the early seventeenth century. There is also a detailed, but brief, content listing provided before the main body of the text commences, which is a valuable navigational aid. The e-book provides an additional, if somewhat confusing, clickable contents listing. Errors in the page numbers within this seem to suggest that the book runs into the thousands, rather than hundreds of pages.