In 2016, scientist Rosaly Lopes and artist Michael Carroll teamed up as fellows of the National Science Foundation to travel to Mount Erebus, the world’s southernmost active volcano in Antarctica. The logistics of getting there and complex operations of Antarctica’s McMurdo Station echo the kinds of strategies that future explorers will undertake as they set up settlements on Mars and beyond. This exciting popular-level book explores the arduous environment of Antarctica and how it is similar to other icy worlds in the Solar System.

Author/artist Michael Carroll received the AAS Division of Planetary Science’s Jonathan Eberhart Award for the best planetary science feature article of 2012. He lectures extensively in concert with his various books and has done invited talks at science museums, aerospace facilities, and NASA centers. He is a Fellow of the International Association for the Astronomical Arts and has written articles and books on topics ranging from space to archaeology. His articles have appeared in Popular Science, Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, Astronomy Now (UK), and a host of international magazines. His twenty-some book titles include Alien Volcanoes (Johns Hopkins University Press), Space Art (Random House), Drifting on Alien Winds (Springer 2011) and his cosmic murder mysteries, On the Shores of Titan’s Farthest Sea and Europa’s Lost Expedition, both through Springer. His latest book nonfiction book — his seventh from Springer — is Earths of Distant Suns: How we find them, communicate with them, and maybe even go there (2016).