Edmund Stump
In this deeply personal account of his first Antarctic expedition, Luyendyk weaves a tale of adventure, peril, frustration, and awe...It is also a fascinating window into the interpersonal dynamics of a small, remote, field party and the complex mind of its author.
Brian Fagan
Bruce Luyendyk is a highly respected geologist, whose research took him on three expeditions to Antarctica’s Marie Byrd Land during the 1990s. He even has an Antarctic Mountain named after him. Mighty Bad Land tells the story of the first of these trips to one of the remotest places on earth in personal terms. You emerge with a true sense of the complex emotions and changing relationships that lay at the core of the field experiences. This is a vivid account of the challenges of Antarctic research which resulted in the discovery of a vanished continent: Zealandia. Luyendyk makes tough fieldwork come alive in this unique story.
Historian Edward J. Larson
Mighty Bad Land is an unvarnished account of a scientist and his team exploring one of the most remote wild places left on Earth. Now retired, Luyendyk tells this story firsthand. Readers will learn from him what kind of people do science at the uttermost end of the earth and how they do it. They will follow his team, and see his personal challenges, on their first expedition. They’ll find the answer to the question: what does it take to prevail in Antarctica today? It takes the same sort of grit that it took 120 years ago from scientists traveling on the Discovery, Nimrod, and Terra Nova. Welcome aboard.
Dr. Robert D. Ballard
"Explorers who enter the unknown not only learn about a world no other has ever seen before but they also discover themselves.
Shelly Lowenkopf
With this intriguing narrative, Bruce Luyendyk has created a new genre, the Geothriller. Humans and their agendas are upstaged by rocks, glaciers, and continents, where all seek mischievous outcomes. Once you read this book, you’ll never look at a map the same way.
Kirkus Reviews
2023-06-25
Luyendyk’s memoir recounts a geological expedition to the “pure wilderness” of Antarctica's Marie Byrd Land.
The Marie Byrd Land region of Antarctica is one of the most remote territories on the planet, a “pure wilderness experienced by few humans” that has earned the nickname Mighty Bad Land. For six weeks in late 1989 and early 1990, the author, a geology professor, experienced it as the leader of a six-person scientific expedition, encountering enough challenges to satisfy even the most demanding fans of nonfiction adventure. In Marie Byrd Land, “zero degrees Fahrenheit is a warm day, grandeur stirs disbelief, and in summer, there is no night,” he writes in his engaging account of the expedition. The goal of the enterprise was to investigate, through the analysis of rock samples, how the southern “supercontinent” of Gondwana split apart. To that end, Luyendyk and his team endured an eight-hour flight in a Hercules transport aircraft to the McMurdo Station on Antarctica’s Ross Island, where they spent two weeks preparing to “unearth the secrets of Marie Byrd Land.” The author is particularly adept at evoking the privations of Antarctic life—a McMurdo building “reminded me of a down-market ski resort,” while a colony of penguins “stunk like old fish.” The team’s sojourn into the eerie emptiness of Marie Byrd Land included such mishaps as one member’s falling 100 feet into an ice crevasse—“I almost died,” he told Luyendyk—and some tense interpersonal dynamics. Luyendyk struggles with his own demons, fretting over his “weight of responsibility” as expedition leader: “I felt frightened often, more than I expected, and anxious,” he later tells his therapist. There is some padding that weighs down the book, as the author re-creates every planning discussion with his colleagues, and lay readers may find the level of geological detail—as when the team members get into an argument about “anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility”—somewhat intimidating. But the journey is mostly a memorable one, leaving no doubt that, “In Antarctica, nothing’s under control.”
Vividly details the harshness and hazards of life in a “land of hypnotic chaos.
