5.0 out of 5 based on 1 reviews. – Customer review on 29/10/2007

Even by Antarctic standards, the Dry Valleys of McMurdo Sound seem to be landscapes of extraordinary extremes. They contain some of coldest and the driest environments on earth, ‘more akin to Mars than to anything terrestrial’. As one of the few ice-free areas of the frozen continent, they represent ‘a wilderness of stone encircled by a wilderness of ice.’
Yet despite their seemingly inhospitable climate and dryness, life exists here too. Nematode worms, yeasts, bacteria, algae, lichens and filamentous fungi survive in primitive ecosystems – providing scientists with the means to study life ‘in extremis’. There are also lakes, and streams that, during the short summer season at least, burble and flow.
While author Bill Green writes that – in Antarctic terms at least - the landscapes of the Dry Valleys are perhaps more familiar than the ‘vast tract of whiteness against which it is set’, Craig Potton’s photographs show that in other ways the Dry Valleys remain utterly alien. The cover image depicts crumbling red ridges draped in aprons of talus slopes, something which you could easily imagine is a North American landscape, except for three improbably blue tarns, clearly frozen and incongruous with their barren surroundings.
It’s these striking juxtapositions that exemplify the fascination the Dry Valleys seem to hold for those that have experienced them.
Scott’s party from the 1903 Discovery Expedition became the first to witness the Dry Valleys, and since then they have continued to fascinate and enrapture the few scientists and artists who have had the privilege to visit.
Bill Green, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University in Ohio, is a scientist who can write like a poet. ‘The lakes are things of beauty in and of themselves, expanses of crystalline ice where light is taken in, released, and returned to the eye in the most extraordinary blues, as though blue were not a secondary quality at all, but an actual thing itself, an object, a cube of blue but without the encumbrance of the physical cube, just pure and perfect color.’
His vivid essay is intelligent and informative, but also deeply personal. After an introduction, Green presents a series of ‘remembrances’ from his nine field seasons working in the valleys between 1968 and 2000. In the photo captions he also provides interpretation and insight into Potton’s photographs.
Craig Potton has spent comparatively little time in the Dry Valleys, and the images result from a few weeks snatched between Antarctic storms in the summer of 2002-3. Given such a short time in which to work, the images of Improbable Eden prove remarkable for the both their quality and diversity. The design is spare, almost stark, thoroughly befitting its subject. There’s usually only one image per page, and across a double page spread the photographs are often paired, comprising different compositions of the same scene; one detail, one wide-angle, so you gain a sense of both the immensity and intimacy of the landscape. These are richly textured images, often taken in subtle light.
Potton frequently breaks traditional rules of photographic composition - and succeeds. Like one of Lake Chad, where the subjects – lake, talus, mountain and sky - converge in a series of triangles, without any ‘line of thirds’ discernible.
Improbable Eden provides readers with a combination of crafted images and passages unlike any other book on Antarctica I’ve seen. It’s a remarkable collaboration of two very talented men.

Shaun Barnett