Gillen D’Arcy Wood is professor of environmental humanities and English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as associate director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment. His prizewinning book Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World has been widely influential in ecocriticism and climate studies, and was recognized in “book of the year” awards by the Guardian, the Times (London), and the American Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. His follow-up climate history, Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of Its Ice, reconstructs the Victorian-era South Polar expeditions as an original encounter with a precariously glaciated Earth and climate change.
His project, “Oceans 1876,” revisits the famous voyage of the HMS Challenger (1872–76), the first to catalog the species, currents, and climate zones of the world’s oceans. What can the untapped Challenger data from the 1870s tell us about the current state of the oceans under climate change — and how to protect them?
