Claire Eamer, one of the authors in POLARIS: A Celebration of Polar Science, describes where she got her inspiration:

When I was asked to think about a story on polar science for an IPY anthology, the first thing that came to mind was climate change. There’s a reason for that. Several reasons, actually.
The first reason was that I’d just spent more than three years helping coordinate a network of researchers looking into climate change, so I already knew quite a bit about the science. And I live in the Yukon, the far northwest of Canada, where the level of warming is among the highest in the world.
The main reason, though, is that I live in a very peculiar place in terms of the big climate-change picture. Most of the Yukon was part of Beringia during the last ice age. That’s a sort of once-and-future continent that appears when the ice locks up enough of the world’s water to lower the sea level substantially. Then bare land appears between Asia and North America – and much of the interior of what is now Alaska and the Yukon remains ice-free, even though glaciers build up around it. During the last ice age, Beringia was an important refuge for both animals and people.
So, I started thinking about what might happen if Beringia returned. What if the rapid warming that we’re seeing now changed the ocean currents enough to tip us back into another ice age, as some scientists have speculated it might? What would the land be like? What would life be like? And would anyone be able to make use of the knowledge that we’ve gained through science about both the distant past and the possible future?
Those what-ifs turned into Davon and his adventure in the Lost Land.


Photography by Claire Eamer.
Main photo:McIntyre 002, The huge valley of the Yukon River in northwestern Canada inspired the landscape of "The Lost Land."
Below: FishLake 006, In "The Lost Land," Davon walked across a treeless Yukon landscape like this, toward the distant ice-covered mountains.