ABSTRACT
Antarctica is a proxy world. It stands in for all the places we can't reach or don't understand – the most extraterritorial and extraterrestrial place on Earth. Antarctica is acknowledged as being site of important indicators in disturbance of global climate systems. Data collected by satellites in Earth orbit or projected through future-oriented climate modelling have been prominent in rendering Earth intelligible as a planetary system in which all human and non-human processes are interlinked. The novel monitoring technologies, with their origins in military and strategic requirements of the Cold War, have also been integral to understanding disruptions to Earth systems in the Anthropocene. The ozone hole episode as a 'near miss' of Anthropocene, establishes Antarctica as the site of planetary-scale human catastrophes. It is the remote place where invisible damage is given greatest visibility, whether in data retrieved from ice cores, or in satellite maps revealing a cascade of ice melt, or in the plotting of the ozone hole.
