Los Angeles, Dec 11 (IANS): Singer Lorde recalls how she had to urinate using an instrument during a trip to Antarctica that she took last year.

"It's very, very white, everywhere you look. There are hundreds of thousands of penguins. But there are also beautiful rocky beaches, which on a sunny day make you feel like you could have a cheeky swim, until you remember the salt water is at a temperature below freezing," Lorde, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O'Connor, wrote for Rolling Stone, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

Reminiscing about her trip, she added: "You have to wear sunglasses, every single day. My pen froze in my bag. I peed into a bottle in the middle of an ice shelf, fully clothed, using a green plastic instrument called, unspeakably, a Pstyle. I ate so many dense, sweet energy bars I thought my teeth might fall out."

The singer, 24, says she has been "obsessed" with the continent since childhood, and spoke about how her passion only increased during her teenage years.

"There was another thing, galvanised in my late teens -- Antarctica was melting. Our whole world was getting warmer, in fact, the mercury rising by minute amounts, inching us toward the unthinkable. I pictured a giant slush pile, scientists frantically bailing out glaciers with buckets. Antarctica's high drama compelled me. I had to see it before it was too late. And because I'm a pop star, and the world is extremely unfair, I made a few calls, got several dozen booster shots, and I was off in search of the end of the world," she wrote.

Lorde is inspired to release a book of writings and pictures from her time in Antarctica, and she hopes to inspire others to do what they can to save the area.

"I get it -- protecting our most precious natural resources can feel abstract, to say the least. Most of them we've never seen, except in a documentary. We're attempting to pay off our predecessors' environmental debts in the hazy hope that our descendants will thrive. It's a lot to ask of a species hungry for faster and brighter gratification, less and less distance," she wrote.

She understands it now and hopes to find ways as well. "Great wonders like this are what's at stake," she observed.