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This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato.

And today we're taking a field trip to the coolest places on Earth, literally the poles of our planet.

I'm up there looking for fossils, but first I'm stuck trying to survive, staying warm.

A new book illustrates the wonders of Antarctica and the Arctic,

and the length scientists go to to study such harsh climates before it's too late.

It's called Ends of the Earth Journeys to the Polar

Regions in Search of Life, The Cosmos, and Our Future. Author, Dr. Neil Schubin, an evolutionary

biologist at the University of Chicago, joins us now. Neil, welcome back. Thanks for having me on.

Appreciate it. You know, when I visited Antarctica, I found it to be life-changing.

I don't know about you.

I couldn't view the world the same way again.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book.

I mean, these places change the way you see the world.

They've changed the way I see myself.

I mean, having worked in the Arctic and Antarctica for almost four decades now,

they changed the way you see our species, place in nature, and on and on and on. They're just so

profound. Even just the ice itself, it was very surprising to me. And one of my most memorable

views of Antarctica when I first saw the ice is that it even has color. It's blue. Tell me what

you find so exciting about the ice. It's mind-blowing the shapes it can take, the forms it could

take, the sounds it makes, the colors, as you mentioned. This is incredible stuff, the ice,

because it's an amazingly complicated substance. I mean, we think we all know ice, right?

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