The International Polar Foundation's SciencePoles website has an interview Meredith Hooper to mark the publication of her new book: 'The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica'. A trustee of the IPF-UK and recipient of the US National Science Foundation Antarctica Service Medal, Meredith Hooper's writing ranges from award-wining non-fiction books for all ages to academic articles and highly acclaimed fiction and information titles for children. During the last fourteen years, she has been invited as a writer on United States and Australian Antarctic programmes and has specialised in writing about the history, geology and wildlife of Antarctica.

Below are some excerpts from the book, reprinted here with kind permission of Meredith Hooper.

'Fifty years ago, a thousand pairs of Adélie penguins nested here. [...] Look down, to the ground, at the covering of small pebbles, each selected and carried in the beak of an Adélie penguin, sturdy pink feet clambering, slipping, hopping, gripping, climbing uphill, pebble held firmly, until it is laid, with careful intent, in a nest. Here is the reversal of nature's processes which move, over thousands of years, sharp-edged lumps of rock down slopes, fracturing and splitting, jamming and sticking, warming and freezing, until, rolled and thrumelled in the ocean, they are thrust back up on shore, sifted by the rasp and suck of tides. See the labour of penguins, the patient sieving and selection, the lifting and carrying. See the transference of seashore, to hillside.

The labours are irrevocably, poignantly, revealed. There are no sounds but the wash of the sea, the occasional calls of skuas. Every penguin is gone. The nests are abandoned. Listen to the silence. The silence of absence. The sound of failure.

Bill stands tall, still, on the carefully sorted pebbles. Standing where it should not be possible to stand, in the centre of a penguin colony, in the middle of summer. [...] Brown skuas sit on nearby points of rock, quietly, wings folded. No angry cries, no diving, high-pitched alarm calls: they have no chicks to protect. The browns move in a little closer. I ask Bill what they are doing. We are the only living things here, he says morosely. There's always a chance we might be dead.' (p. 151-152) From 'The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica', published by Profile Books, 2007. (c) Meredith Hooper

'Antarctica is original planet. It's what draws me back, the noise stripped away, the challenge to see, think, feel, in this uncluttered place. But it is Antarctica's starkness, this freedom from the complexity of much of the rest of the world, that gives it crucial advantages for scientists, as a place to study climate change. No cities, no agricultural practices, no highways, or change of land use. Here the physical environment is not relegated and regulated. The ecological networks, the food chains, are relatively straight forward, comparatively simple systems far from the confusing signals of most of the rest of the world. The requirements on every living thing continually to negotiate temporary occupancy, to manage the complex interplay of climate and place, is palpable. Living things flourish where they can, while they can. Salutary reminders for us humans, cocooned by urban living, lulled into assuming we can somehow ignore, or forget, the changeability and vulnerability of the thin layer of planet we use, the tiny, damp, curved space we happen to occupy at a pleasantly warm moment. Here on the Antarctic Peninsula impacts of warming can be tracked. It's a clear, stripped-down preview of what could occur elsewhere. It's an unpacking of the ways climate change can reveal itself. It's a prologue to the way climate change can happen.' (p. 163-164) From 'The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica', published by Profile Books, 2007. (c) Meredith Hooper

'Cold doesn't affect the chicks. It's the rain, soaking their down, forcing them to shiver, using up vital calories in an attempt to keep warm. Bill: 'The rain will wipe out the weaklings, the runts. Soaked through, they shiver to death, too weak to respond. They can't fight it. Little bodies sprawled on their stomachs on the wet ground, barely lifting their heads. Immobile bundles, meals in waiting. The low numbers this season have already made them vulnerable. Now they are easy pickings for skuas and giant petrels. [...] The older chicks can creche for communal warmth. The little chicks are always on the outside.' ' (p. 165) From 'The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica', published by Profile Books, 2007. (c) Meredith Hooper

'It takes surprisingly little warming, or cooling, to make a difference to climate. But in parts of the Antarctic Peninsula temperatures hover around a critical divide: the melting point of ice. The crucial shift is from freezing to liquid, liquid to freezing: that extraordinary dual state of water, tipping either edge of a point, flipping function and status within the smallest range. The peninsula is now a permanent performer in the theatre of ice to water. It has begun to decouple from the ice age.' (p. 274) From 'The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica', published by Profile Books, 2007. (c) Meredith Hooper

'Recent events on the Antarctic Peninsula show that sustantial changes can happen, fast. Time scales can be much, much shorter than scientists thought. But trying to work out what might happen to the polar ice sheets in the current warming world is exceptionally difficult. Trying to work out what might happen in a future warming world is even more difficult.' (p. 276) From 'The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica', published by Profile Books, 2007. (c) Meredith Hooper

'Antarctica is a sensitive, critically important, pivotal part of the tightly coupled system that is our planet. Seeing the earth as an integrated system is new. Trying to understand Antarctica's role is very new. Pinning down any understanding of how the components of the climate system behave, and interact, in this geographically remote, physically isolated part of the world, is a struggle. The Antarctic continent is by definition a complex of responses, a mosaic of unstudied potential.' (p. 279) From 'The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica', published by Profile Books, 2007. (c) Meredith Hooper