Polar history can be seen through four different temporal lenses. There is Deep Time with its geological timescales against which to interpret and understand change. There is the ‘golden age’ of polar history, approximately 1800 to 1930, which orients the significance of the poles through the perspective of colonial exploration. There is the Anthropocene, our post-Holocene human-dominated epoch, which scholars have dated (not without controversy) to the 1950s and after. The Anthropocene is part of the geological timescale, but in the polar regions it corresponds to a temporality traditionally rooted in geopolitics: the Cold War era of militarization and intensified scientific interest in the polar regions.