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Southern Winds

Every place, no matter where, has its own southern narrative: the unheard voices of the world’s overlooked regions.

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The Poles Won’t Hold: Current Warming Is Their Death Sentence

Martina H
10 min read9 hours ago

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The Poles Won’t Hold (photo by author)

I’ve never liked the word “remote.” Not when people use it to describe the Arctic. Not when journalists call these landscapes “empty,” as if tundra has nothing to say unless it’s melting in front of a camera. I grew up surrounded by this supposed nothingness, near the edge of Sweden’s north, where winter could swallow entire months and daylight arrived like an apology.

But the Arctic wasn’t far — it was home. Solitary, yes. But also a confident.

A place that could keep your secrets.

As a child, I’d press my palms into the snow and listen — the void. I’d put my ears in the ice — the rumors. The silence wasn’t empty. It was layered. Ancient. Heavy with things the ice had buried long before I was born: bones, pollen, Cold War fallout, time, and my deepest secrets, too.

But now the ice is talking back.

Some days it moans like something trying not to break.

Other days, it cracks without warning — loud enough to make you freeze mid-step, heart in your mouth.

There are no words. But numbers. Floods. Collapse. And the kind of science that reads more…

Southern Winds
Southern Winds

Published in Southern Winds

Every place, no matter where, has its own southern narrative: the unheard voices of the world’s overlooked regions.

Martina H
Martina H

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