Hester Blum's The News at the Ends of the Earth sets its sights on an archive of extremes: ephemera printed by explorers wintering over at the poles on fragile wooden ships encased precariously in ice. Why, the book asks, did expeditionary members go to the trouble of collectively authoring and printing newspapers? To what ends were polar expeditions outfitted with printing presses, of all things? What in the world is the news at the ends of the earth? A key paradox anchors these questions, namely that polar explorers turned to ephemeral forms of print, as well as potentially dead networks of circulation, in order to mediate the climatological extremes that pushed them to the brink. Blum deftly illustrates how the seriality of the newspaper becomes, in the hands of expeditionary crew members, a regulatory mechanism for imposing “diurnal order on a region without sun” (45). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this project “goes awry” more often than not (45), but its failures are revelatory because they “encode” and elucidate “the fleeting ephemerality of human life in climate extremity” (28). “[N]ever designed to stay, to stick, to make it to the shelf” (70), polar ephemera are unmoored from the rhythms of metropolitan publishing networks and pushed to illuminating extremes on ice. The insights of Blum's archive, in other words, emerge from (not in spite of) its inbuilt evanescence – its partiality, fragility, impotence.

At once shaping and shaped by the environmental conditions of their production, polar ephemera are theorized by Blum as “ecomedia,” or “technological media … register[ing] complex systems of ecological and environmental change” (29). Blum's turn to ecomedia is an imperative attempt “to reconcile the structural estrangement of print culture from ecocriticism” for the purpose of reimagining what, how, and why we read in climatic extremes, past or present, then or now (38). Oceanic studies here affords a crucial interpretive lens because it denaturalizes disciplinary as well as geographic borders. Blum argues that oceanic reading methods are ideally calibrated to polar ecomedia because they register the “multidimensional flux” of nineteenth-century icescapes and their anthropocenic premonitions (33). Reading The News at the Ends of the Earth while following news of Alaska's hottest month on record – and now writing as the Amazon burns and Hurricane Dorian devastates the Bahamas – I cannot help but wonder where the polar regions sketched in Blum's archive will stand when this review is published. Certainly, they will be disappearing at accelerating rates – not into oblivion, however, but in altered anthropogenic forms.

The News at the Ends of the Earth invites such presentist reflection because it excavates the “planetary implications” of “evanescent printed records generated in polar extremity” (5) for human beings now inhabiting the extremities of total climate collapse. These transhistorical continuities echo across the book's five chapters. The first examines shipboard print cultures enabled by tabletop presses, focussing on how “polar periodicals are produced quite literally in the laps of their readership” (46), thus establishing communities whose existence results not strictly from shipboard proximity per se, but rather from “specific ecological conditions” (67). The second and third chapters read the so-called news reported by Arctic and Antarctic periodicals respectively. Especially rich (and tragic) is Blum's attention to some ill-fated ponies who make visible the deeply material consequences of British and Anglo-American dismissals of Indigenous lifeways, and the cultural specificities of making kin. A recurring point of interest throughout is the particularity of polar colonial encounter. Thus Blum's fourth chapter considers the expeditionary use of cairns as dead-letter delivery systems. Whereas for expeditionary members cairns were mere storage receptacles (for messages as well as supplies), for the Inuit and other northern peoples they are “communicative media within themselves” (198). Called inuksuit, or “that which acts in the capacity of a human,” these cairns possess special communicational and navigational significance (226). Inuit communities recognized the differences between cairn types, but British and Anglo-American explorers were less perceptive, mistaking inuksuit for caches and often destroying them. Charles Francis Hall, the fifth and final chapter's central figure, is in this context singular because he takes traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) on its own terms, investigating how it “creates a world whose circuits oscillate beyond Western evidentiary understanding” (227). Yet, as Blum notes, Hall remains an all too familiar type, raising funds for a trip north by putting on ethnographic display an Inuit couple – Ipiirviq and Taqulittuq – upon whom he depended for knowledge and community in the Arctic.

The News at the Ends of the Earth is exciting, both for what it definitively argues and for the questions it incites. Much remains to be understood about the eco-imperial valences of Blum's archive. Blum argues that the poles “frustrate imperial or national ambitions,” for “they are governed by geophysical forces and biological habits different from the fluid, unfrozen nautical world” (33). Preconceived logics of colonialism – “Old and New World imaginaries,” for instance – take on “less imperial” meanings at the poles (105). I continue to wonder about the questions of animacy and speculation, life and fantasy, which haunt the book's archive. How do polar periodicals represent the material histories and ramifications of “global passage[s]” undertaken not just literally but also conceptually by polar explorers (often in the form of speculative fictions conjuring uninhabited Arctic wastelands turned paradisiacal cornucopias for colonial claiming)? Blum's account of queer relationality points toward additional avenues for further inquiry. Queer sex was perhaps a largely “situational” occurrence on polar expeditions (124) and Blum notes that “[s]exually suggestive language” of all kinds was censored in facsimile editions of polar periodicals published for public consumption (129). How might queer theory fathom the ephemeral attachments which took shape aboard ship (and were potentially stricken from the record)? If, as Blum shows, crew members possessed a (potentially coercive) duty to maintain shipboard health by contributing to polar periodicals, what larger histories of nonidentification and disaffection, of looking away and feeling backward, remain to be un-iced – and how might they re-vision the term “Anthropocene” and its discontents? The News at the Ends of the Earth forges welcome throughways for exploring these and other pressing questions.