The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic Edited by Elizabeth Kolbert and Francis Spufford Granta Books £25, 288 pages FT bookshop price: £20

Here we are in the International Polar Year, and, as the Poles threaten to melt away, here are two handsome little books to remember them by. In the second volume in this twin set – the Arctic anthology – Elizabeth Kolbert has done a neat job, summoning up witnesses to the frozen seas of the far north. It falls to Francis I May Be Some Time Spufford to do the same for the land mass of the extreme south – and I can’t think of anyone I’d have preferred the compendium to be edited by.

Spufford lays before us a spread of goings-on, each helping explain why this cruel, vestigial chunk of Gondwanaland has such an ability to entrance us. His collection begins with the Antarctic as a “place apart” where, in the “heroic era” of Edwardians, our valiant representatives set out like knights to duel in the snows, championing manly virtues and seeking to plant their flags.

Most of the names here are familiar – Scott, Cherry-Garrard, Shackleton, Mawson – but the extracts are refreshingly chosen for all that, and joining them is the much overlooked Nobu Shirase, whose Japanese sledging exploit coincided with the Amundsen-Scott race, reminding us that claiming the South Pole wasn’t just a European pre-occupation.

Then on to more complicated times, when the last great wilderness was starting to look less daunting. It might have been the other end of the planet, but by the 1980s ordinary people were threatening it with CFC emissions – all from the comfort of the kitchen. Some aerosols were banned; meanwhile, dogs were outlawed from the Antarctic. A treaty restrained those scrambling for mineral rights.

Finally to the present era, in which scientists set up their ice-station colonies, and the editor finds travel-writers, sci-fi novelists, blue-collar labourers and other transients also doing their bit to colour in the great white canvas. By now, Antarctica isn’t just a faraway wilderness we threatened – it is able to threaten us. Continue melting it, and we’d be washed away. As Spufford points out, the place had been transformed from a numbing fortress we’d set out to conquer into a fragile panel of our planet’s fabric – and the whole tale lasts for only a century.

As with the Arctic volume, this decidedly isn’t a “lasting contribution to the debate over global warning” as the publisher claims. Nor is it altogether a “memorable collection of great writing”. But the writing is great at times, almost always memorable and the entire project is a glorious taste of the cold south in all its bewildering, vengeful complexity.

Benedict Allen is an explorer and the author of ‘Into the Abyss’ (Faber)