Living and working in polar landscapes is as much about values as it is learning to survive in harsh environments or making scientific observations. Insights can emerge from unexpected encounters with the terrain.

I nearly wore out the soles of my boots at our first Greenland camp in 1988. Farish had scrutinized crude aerial photos and maps to find a promising campsite before the expedition. Once we hit the ground, however, it became clear that we were a long hike from any rocks that could hold fossils. The trip to good outcrops took us miles along a valley floor through fields of eroded boulders, pebbles, and silt that forms muds during the early season snowmelt. Fossils were the last thing on my mind on hikes. I walked in zigzags to avoid viscous muds while trying to maintain my concentration in the din of incessant polar winds.

One day, my attention was jolted away from the rocks, mud, and wind by the sight of an injured shorebird with an orange beak and black feathery ring around its neck. The bird seemed to arrive out of nowhere; it was as if it had magically appeared 10 feet ahead of me. It was clearly in distress, and its urgent cries rose above the roar of wind as it limped along, dragging one wing against the ground. Its pain triggered an instinctive need to help. As I approached the bird, its wings fluttered and it flew 6 feet farther away from me. Then the bird resumed its anguished call and limp. I approached again, but the bird’s wings flickered as it flew another 6 feet away. Not wanting to add to the creature’s discomfort, I reluctantly resumed my trek to the Triassic rocks ahead.

That evening in the kitchen tent, Bill and I dug though my field guides to get the lowdown on the bird. Ringed plovers lay their eggs directly on Arctic ground and need to protect them from roving foxes, owls, and raptors. Plovers have evolved a clever strategy to deceive intruders. As predators approach, the birds feign injury with an anguished cry and a fake damaged wing. They use this dance as a decoy to lure threatening animals ever farther away from the nest. Like a sucker, I fell for a classic avian ruse.

Passing by the site over the next five days, I kept an eye out for the nest while trying not to disturb the parental birds. After a few tries, I happened on three gray eggs, each about the size of a large Brazil nut, lying in a small depression in the rocks. Other than a few stones splayed apart as a cradle under the eggs, the place was indistinguishable from the rest of the rocky landscape. There was no cover, no wall around the nest, and no soft bedding supporting the small eggs. The eggs sat completely exposed to polar storms, gales, and predators—their only defense being camouflage and an adult that can fake an injury. Plover eggs embody the fragility, resilience, and endurance of all polar life: for thousands of years plover chicks have hatched while lying virtually naked in one of the most forbidding environments on Earth.

Through more than three decades in polar regions, that image of plover eggs has sat inside me, whether on traverse or in a helicopter over glaciers. Journeys to the ends of the earth help us see ourselves and our home in new ways. Like the plover, humans live in a fragile balance with the planet, one that—for those of us who do not live at the poles— is masked by our built environment. A human body is a speck on a continent- sized sheet of ice. Our life- times are tiny moments in the multibillion-year history of the meteorites inside glaciers and the rocks in valley walls. And we live in a relationship with a planet that is capable of dramatic environmental change.

But rather than make us feel small and insignificant, polar regions can enlarge us. Scientific discovery at the poles reveals our deep connections to one another and to the planet. Here, life is only possible when humans look beyond themselves to survive, thrive, and adapt. Our existence on frozen tundra and ice is impossible if we do not learn from and collaborate with one another. And the more we look, the more we find that polar regions are themselves fragile places, ones that can change in a brief moment of geological time. It is profoundly humbling to find our own vulnerabilities— as well as our capacities for resilience, growth, and discovery— in the most remote and delicate landscapes on our planet.

Excerpted from ENDS OF THE EARTH: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future by Neil Shubin, published on Feb. 4, 2025, by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2025 by Neil Shubin.