The Adam of Antarctica : THE CRYSTAL DESERT: Summers in Antarctica <i> By David G. Campbell</i> , <i> (Houghton Mifflin: $21.95; 308 pp.)</i>

The finest journals of discovery are a balance between the explorer and the explored. David G. Campbell’s account of Antarctica, where he spent three summers as a research biologist, is the truest balance imaginable.

He worked at the Brazilian scientific station in the South Shetlands just off the Antarctic Peninsula, a spit of land that runs farther north than any other point on the continent. For its relatively moderate marine climate, it is known as the Banana Belt. Campbell’s study was the life cycle of fish and seal parasites.

That may sound oddly specialized for such an expansive book. Its author touches on everything from continental drift to the history of Antarctic exploration and exploitation, to the lives and deaths of whales, seals and penguins, to the confinement and camaraderie of what, by its isolation, is virtually a space station, to the poetical mathematics of bird flight, to the splendor and strangeness of a land that is glacier-blue. Campbell is like Adam naming the things of a world that seems just created; and we only wish Adam had used language so well.

If parasitology seems a narrow vantage point for all this, the reader soon comes to realize that it is not. Parasites are less specialized than whales, for example, being everywhere, infinitely adaptable and entirely unendangered. They are, the author makes us see, the most sociably ecological of organisms, in their intense dependency on all the others, as well as the most human, in that they destroy precisely what they depend on.

Whoever may see the world in a grain of sand, Campbell makes us see it in the spiny-headed worm, which lodges in tiny shrimp-like crustaceans. When hospitality shows signs of depletion, the worm’s only hope is to get its host eaten. Accordingly, it secretes substances that turn its shrimp from translucent gray to splotchy red, and cause it to dance wildly. This attracts the attention of fish, who eat it. By this time, the worm is off seafood and needs red meat. It goes into a passive state until, sooner or later, a seal eats the fish.

When science writers write well, they are apt to produce something that resembles a novel more than many novels do. The spiny-head saga is roman fleuve stuff, more Balzac than Proust. But it is only one aspect of the writing in “The Crystal Desert.”

Campbell makes the larger setting and significance of the Antarctic as vivid and palpable as he does the sight of elephant seals lying “like large white grubs” on the rocky beach; or the discomfort of donning a diving suit stiff with the dried sweat of the previous user. The Antarctic is the polar opposite of the Arctic in more ways than one: a frozen continent surrounded by ocean instead of a frozen ocean surrounded by continents.

“The Antarctic is alone at the bottom of the world amid a swirl of sea and storm,” he writes. With cyclones chasing each other at five-day intervals clockwise around the Southern Ocean, it is a convulsive icy foundry for much of the world’s climate and an important part of its ecology. The Antarctic Convergence, the line where cold water from the South slips under warm water from the North, is the greatest biological frontier in the world, he tells us. The ocean abysses under the tropics are filled with Antarctic forms of life. Antarctic disruption, by the circulation of the oceans and what they contain and the weather they pull along, is upstream from our own future disruption.

Campbell’s concern for the environment is fundamental, but it comes out as exploring more than expounding. He wants to save life mainly because he loves it, unlike some ecological preachers who seem to love life mainly because they want to save it. Ozone depletion worries him; global warming worries him conditionally: He can’t help wondering what such a vast new “experiment” will bring in terms of evolution and adaptation. You sense he would like to be around to see.

“The Crystal Desert” has a rambling pattern, much like that of the Brazilian station: outdoor activity and observation by day, reflection, study and writing up a journal in the evening.

There is the sheer wonder and exuberance of what he sees in an atmosphere so clear of dust and pollen that it is like having binoculars permanently attached, and with a startling absence of smells. There are few forms of indigenous life on the ground--midges and lichens; “biological haiku,” he calls it--and, in the subzero temperatures, little of the rotting and fermenting that goes on in temperate climates. Penguins and seals are smelly enough--excrement has nowhere to drain on the rocky surface--but, like smelly humans, they are visitors.

The water is much more alive. In the depths, there is a richness of invertebrate life comparable to that of a coral reef. There are relatively few varieties of fish; on the other hand, there are great clouds of krill, tiny crustaceans that nourish whales, fish and seabirds, and that constitute, in their collective and innumerable trillions, the largest biomass of any species on earth.

In his careful hikes and scuba dives--nobody goes out alone and every outing is logged and monitored--Campbell’s writing has a lilting exuberance. Here he is on the flight pattern of the tiny Wilson’s stormy petrel:

“They flit among the waves like frail black butterflies, their white rumps and white wing chevrons clearly visible from above. Yet these little birds are almost impossible to track in the tumult of the waves. That they are able to fly over the complex, randomly shifting sea surface, those moving mountains of water fretted with reverberating pulses and shocks, seems to me the epitome of evolutionary eloquence. What cerebral wiring--and what programs--they must possess in that pea of a brain, safe behind hard scull and soft black feathers, to enable them to accomplish these shuttlecock navigations, these magical weavings in the random sea.”

Campbell uses history with almost equal resonance as he explores Antarctica’s past. Here, in one stark sentence, an Englishman presents 19th-Century seal hunters clubbing and skinning their quarry, sometimes while it was still alive:

“When the red carcase set up and looked at itself, I looked up to see if God’s eye was looking.”

Woven among the history, the horror, the science and the beauty is an appealing account of his daily life with the Brazilian researchers. There was stress--an incipient sign of breakdown known as “big eye” was carefully monitored--but there was a warmth and gaiety of detail that was both admirably Brazilian and admirably suitable. Comfort food-- feijoada , coconut cakes, jet-black sweet coffee--was constantly available; so were measured amounts of cachaca or Brazilian brandy. Tambourines and drums were kept in the recreation room of what came to be known as “Little Copacabana,” and were frequently used. Nuisance though they were--they treated the Brazilian scientists as “natives,” tried to barter T-shirts with them, and left their colds behind--even tourist parties were given cachaca and invited to dance.

Campbell is as open to people as he is to stormy petrels, and he writes about them as respectfully. Not sentimentally, though; he knows that even scientists--not to mention tourists and mineral prospectors--are an incursion in a fragile place. When the summer ended, and the research team was flown out, he writes, they shared the plane with tons of outbound garbage.