A century ago the only scientists in the far southern region of the planet were locked tight in the coastal ice of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. There the British Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton was held fast in 1915 by the impenetrable ice that slowly crushed his ship during the long Antarctic winter. Russia and the United States returned to that forbidding area in 1992, capping off thirty-five years of unusual Cold War political cooperation in Antarctica by jointly staffing a research station on Weddell Sea pack ice. Both of these expeditions took place near the only continent without indigenous people or any legacy of effective national sovereignty.