Griffith Review 77: Real Cool World explores Antarctica as both a place and a canvas for imagination. This vast, dry continent drives much of our global weather, a litmus test for change at the world’s extremities and a canary in the coalmine.

Stories about this deep south illuminate much of the rest of the planet’s past and future, and they also create a space to play out human ideas of exploration, investigation, and fantasy; ideas of other places, differently managed, often unattainable – particularly with the recent pause in global tourism.

Is this an isolated arena for collaboration and cooperation – or a landscape where harsher realities are always navigated and often realised? Overarching this space, the Antarctic Treaty has weathered sixty years since its first signing, transforming from a baseline of scientific freedoms and territorial co-existence to encompass broad swathes of environmental protection and ever-changing delineations in the world’s atlas of political relationships.

What do these treaties mean now – for Antarctica itself, and for global ideas of governance – as geopolitical alliances and desires shift and change, as the race for new sources of resources heats up, and as the results of a changing climate and exceeded tipping points come into play?

Featuring powerful and beautiful narratives from the worlds of glaciology and marine biology to geopolitics, fiction and more, this collection explores science and stories from the planet’s southernmost continent.