The Ice at the End of the World
An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future
âJon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited. The result is a gripping and important book.ââElizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prizeâwinning author of The Sixth Extinction
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post ⢠The Christian Science Monitor ⢠Library Journal
Greenland: a remote, mysterious island five times the size of California but with a population of just 56,000. The ice sheet that covers it is 700 miles wide and 1,500 miles long, and is composed of nearly three quadrillion tons of ice. For the last 150 years, explorers and scientists have sought to understand Greenlandâat first hoping that it would serve as a gateway to the North Pole, and later coming to realize that it contained essential information about our climate. Locked within this vast and frozen white desert are some of the most profound secrets about our planet and its future. Greenlandâs ice doesnât just tell us where weâve been. More urgently, it tells us where weâre headed.
In The Ice at the End of the World, Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earthâs last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory. The history of Greenlandâs ice begins with the explorers who arrived here at the turn of the twentieth centuryâfirst on foot, then on skis, then on crude, motorized sledsâand embarked on grueling expeditions that took as long as a year and often ended in frostbitten tragedy. Their original goal was simple: to conquer Greenlandâs seemingly infinite interior. Yet their efforts eventually gave way to scientists who built lonely encampments out on the ice and began drillingâone mile, two miles down. Their aim was to pull up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of earthâs past, going back hundreds of thousands of years.
Today, scientists from all over the world are deploying every technological tool available to uncover the secrets of this frozen island before itâs too late. As Greenlandâs ice melts and runs off into the sea, it not only threatens to affect hundreds of millions of people who live in coastal areas. It will also have drastic effects on ocean currents, weather systems, economies, and migration patterns.
Gertner chronicles the unfathomable hardships, amazing discoveries, and scientific achievements of the Arcticâs explorers and researchers with a transporting, deeply intelligent styleâand a keen sense of what this work means for the rest of us. The melting ice sheet in Greenland is, in a way, an analog for time. It contains the past. It reflects the present. It can also tell us how much time we might have left.
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Creators
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Release date
June 11, 2019 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781984885081
- File size: 371838 KB
- Duration: 12:54:39
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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AudioFile Magazine
Fred Sanders's narration enlivens an adventure-filled tale of early Arctic exploration that is more creative nonfiction than climate-change tome. Listeners set sail with the first Europeans to explore the planet's largest island--Greenland. Author Jon Gertner, who narrates the introduction and epilogue, is as fascinated with the remote expansiveness of the Greenland ice sheet as the handful of men who persevered through starvation and ice to traverse it. The adventure seamlessly flows from daring Shackleton-like expeditions to the modern science of reconstructing ancient climates using the information found in Greenland's ancient ice cores. With stark seriousness, Sanders delivers the audiobook's grim news--the Greenland ice sheet is disappearing, and something globally catastrophic may already have been set in motion. J.T. Š AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine -
Publisher's Weekly
March 4, 2019
In this remarkably thorough account, Gertner (The Idea Factory), a New York Times Magazine contributor, narrates Greenlandâs history as a destination of rugged explorers and the birth site of glaciology. Gertner builds a fascinating chronology of scientific endeavor and discovery, beginning with âlunaticâ Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansenâs 1888 trek across Greenlandâs frozen tundra. Scientists began flocking there in 1930 to study glaciers, eventually turning to âdeep core drillingâ to extract ice samples from as far as a mile down. By the 1990s, equipment sophisticated enough for âmeticulous, year-by-year reading of the layers of iceâ found evidence of âabrupt climate changeâ 17,500 years ago, in a potential omen of environmental catastrophe to come. More recently, a NASA satellite able to weigh Greenlandâs ice sheet discovered, alarmingly, that it is âlosing well over one hundred billion tons of ice per year.â Gertner demonstrates how each of these discoveries built upon previous work, cumulatively enriching the scientific understanding of climate in general and Greenland in particular. This is vital reading for anyone interested in how climate change has already affected the Earth, and how it might do so in future. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Company.
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Formats
- OverDrive Listen audiobook
subjects
Languages
- English
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