Ten years after her bestselling book on the Antarctic, "Terra Incognita," Sara Wheeler journeys to the opposite pole to take the measure of what is at once the most pristine place on earth and the locus of global warming. Traveling counterclockwise through the territories belonging to Russia, Finland, Denmark, Canada, and America, she marks the changes in what once seemed an unchangeable landscape, as mounting pollution concentrated on the poles reveals the illness of the whole organism of the earth.
Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, shadowing the endless trans-Alaskan pipeline with a band of rowdy truckers, herding reindeer with the Lapps, and visiting the deceptive lands of the Gulag, Wheeler brings the Arctic's many contradictions to life. "The Magnetic North"'s stunning descriptions and revelatory insights create a masterful portrait of a region growing daily in global importance.