Book event

Heart of Ice | Joy McCann in Conversation with  Dr Annaliese Claydon and  Dr Sue Cook

As scientists sound the alarm over abrupt changes in Antarctica’s sea ice and ocean currents—changes that will ripple across the globe—Joy McCann’s new book Heart of Ice: A journey into Antarctica’s
Frozen Realm offers a timely and evocative exploration of the continent’s icy heart and its profound influence on our planet.

Through a compelling journey across space and time, McCann navigates entangled stories of ice and rock, humans, animals, and other species. Drawing on a vast body of scientific and historical research, she explores how Antarctica’s ice sheets, glaciers, ice shelves, and sea ice have been imagined, inhabited, and invested with meaning over time. In doing so, she reframes Antarctica not as a remote wilderness, but as a powerful agent that has shaped – and continues to shape – our history and our planet.

Heart of Ice invites readers to see this vast, frozen realm not just as a scientific frontier, but also as a vibrant, storied, multispecies environment. Its release comes at a critical moment. As the Southern Ocean warms and ice loss accelerates, scientists warn of cascading effects on weather patterns, sea levels, and marine ecosystems. McCann’s book bridges the gap between scientific insight and cultural imagination, offering readers a deeper understanding of why Antarctica matters and what’s at stake.

Dr Joy McCann is an Australian environmental and public historian who explores the interwoven histories of people, places, ideas and the nonhuman world. She is an adjunct associate professor at the University of Tasmania and the author of Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean and Ice Bound: The Australian Story of Antarctica.

Dr Annaliese Claydon is an Adjunct Researcher in the School of the Humanities. Originally from Alaska, she has always been fascinated by the stories that develop along shorelines, edges, and meeting places. She is particularly interested in the entangled histories of polar exploration, whaling, sealing, and maritime families. Her current project examines the linked histories of the Southern Ocean, the Tasman world and the Bering Sea in the nineteenth century, focusing on marine upwellings where animals, people and stories gather.

Dr Sue Cook is a glaciologist and co-lead of the Ice Shelves project for the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania. She works as part of a community of ice sheet scientists in Hobart, whose research aims to measure Antarctica’s current mass loss, understand the physical processes driving change, and develop the models used to predict Antarctica’s future sea level rise contribution.

Join Joy, Annaliese, and Sue at the Afterword Cafe.