About the project
What is "Antarctic Chronicles"?
Antarctic Chronicles is a project that aims to speculate on the evolution of Antarctica's ecosystems, envisioning how this barren land will transform into a vibrant continent teeming with life, developing a unique biota. The project is divided into chapters, each dedicated to describing and illustrating the fauna and flora of a particular period. The project is expected to conclude when Antarctica eventually collides with another continent, marking the end of its prolonged isolation and the uniqueness of its biota. This collision is projected to occur at least 180 million years from the present, bringing significant changes to the continent's ecological landscape.
What about the rest of the world?
The project is completely focused on Antarctica; anything that happens outside it's not of our interest. We don't know how animals and plants are evolving elsewhere, unless they manage to reach our icy continent. However, their evolutionary history will remain a mystery for us.
How much speculative the project will become?
While I like iper-speculative works, I prefer to maintain my project as plausible as possible, limiting improbable body plan and avoiding highly sapient species.
How do you create your illustrations?
Some illustrations are created from zero while others are taken from real images/artworks, which are then modified with Photoshop.
For example, the dusk herdstalker was created by modifying the skeletal of Kelenken (Bertelli et al., 2007).
Why Antarctica?
Antarctica is special: thanks to its geographical isolation and defaunated ecosystem, it's a perfect place for speculative worldbuilding, acting like a seeded world. It's not a small island with a simplified and fragile biota, but an entire continent with (potentially) large ecoregions and complex interactions.
Where are humans?
After 2200, humans have never returned to Antarctica, excluding rare periodical surveys. Their presence on Earth in the future is a question that the project can't and won't discuss. To quote The Author from All Tomorrows:
" Why did they disappear? Perhaps it was a final, unimaginable war of annihilation, one that transcended the very meaning of “conflict”. Perhaps it was a gradual break-up of the united galaxies, and every race facing their private end slowly afterwards. Or perhaps, the wildest theories suggest, it was a mass migration to another plane of existence. A journey into somewhere, sometime, something else. But the bottom line is: we honestly don’t know "
Where did you take the photos of your project?
Photos are almost entirely made by myself: most of them are shot in my country (Italy), which possesses an incredibly varied landscape, from the frigid tundra of the Alps to the subtropical forests of Gargano. Some photos are also taken by my friends, which are always cited when necessary.
