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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June 11, 2019 -
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- ISBN: 9780812996630
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- ISBN: 9780812996630
- File size: 20758 KB
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- English
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Reviews
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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. -
Kirkus
Starred review from March 1, 2019
The past, present, and future of the ice clock on the world's largest island.Journalist Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, 2013) made six trips to Greenland to research this penetrating and engrossing book. The Greenland ice sheet, two miles deep in some places, is "composed of nearly three quadrillion...tons of ice." The author recounts the key 19th-century expeditions to explore the daunting, often harrowing, inner ice shelf. He is especially strong in his descriptions of the brutal cold, winds, ice floes, crevices, frostbite, lost toes, starvation, and loneliness that explorers have experienced over the decades. In 1888, Fridtjof Nansen and a small team dragged heavy sledges over ice peaks as high as houses to become the first to "cross Greenland's ice sheet." He was quickly followed by Robert Peary, the first to explore Greenland's mysterious northern border, a 1,200-mile trek. Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen's explorations, which gathered valuable "ethnographic research on the Inuit," marked the transition from merely exploration to scientific investigation. Alfred Wegener's 1912 expedition "pushed the cause of Arctic science forward" and featured research on seasonal temperatures. One scientist presciently pondered that if all the ice melted, the oceans across the globe "would rise more than 25 feet." Gertner next traces the many expeditions and scientific bases that were established and the use of deep drilling techniques to take sample ice cores all the way to bedrock. Scientists began to record temperatures gradually rising all over the island. Then, in 2012, using NASA's satellites, a polar scientist made a frightening discovery: "We realized the entire surface of the Greenland ice sheet had melted." Water was running to the sea, increasing the calving of glaciers in Greenland and the Arctic. Something "immense and catastrophic" had been set in motion and "could not be easily stopped."A captivating, essential book to add to the necessarily burgeoning literature on global warming.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Booklist
Starred review from April 1, 2019
Best-selling author and accomplished science journalist Gertner (The Idea Factory, 2012) divides his vivid and dramatic chronicle of 130 years of expeditions to Greenland's vast ice sheet into two sections: Explorations and Investigations. The first presents beyond-belief tales of daring journeys across Greenland's immense and treacherous frozen desert by men of courage and conviction, hubris and vision, each keenly portrayed, from Fridtjof Nansen to Robert Peary, Knud Rasmussen, Peter Freuchen, and Alfred Wegener. Gertner entrances with tales of dogsleds, cold, hunger, isolation, disasters, death, and the against-all-odds collection of invaluable scientific data. Technology and military might enabled post-WWII scientists (women and men), similarly devoted to solving the mysteries above, around, and within that million-year-old, miles-thick white expanse, to conduct far more sophisticated inquires, including drilling for and analyzing ice cores which reveal the unnerving fact that the climate can change quickly and drastically. These modern investigators also endured harsh conditions, but ultimately their greatest battle has been against the disregard and denial of their warnings about global warming, the accelerated melting of Greenland's ice sheet and the polar ice caps, and the impending and dire rising of sea levels. Gertner observes that it will take a moral awakening to spur us to confront this looming threat. Hopefully, his deeply engrossing and enlightening ice epic will instigate action.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.) -
Library Journal
May 1, 2019
The New York Times best-selling Gertner (The Idea Factory) explores an on-deadline issue: Greenland's ice sheet, comprising nearly three quadrillion tons of ice, is rapidly melting. It's a climate crisis that also threatens to wipe out hundreds of thousands of years of history. Scientists are now drilling deep into the ice sheet and bringing up cores that reveal how Earth formed--and what it's future might be.
Copyright 1 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission. -
Library Journal
May 1, 2019
In this wide-ranging book, Gertner (The Idea Factory) demonstrates the same excitement for scientific exploration as for the adventures of early polar explorers. The author shares the stories of Fridtjof Nansen, Knud Rasmussen, Alfred Wegener, Robert Peary, and others who ventured to learn what lay at the center of the great ice sheet, what the northern coast was like, and what was happening far above and below the ice. Gertner explains that ice cores were identified as a way to examine annual climate data going back 10,000 years and that melting of the polar ice caps is influenced by ocean temperatures, currents, algae blooms, glacial rivers, calving, and more, all of which contribute to an ever-increasing downward spiral of ice melt. The author also discusses the American base built during the Cold War that left behind radioactive waste and other hazardous materials that will be released as melting occurs, though the base also made possible influential scientific discoveries. A brief paragraph of climate change pseudoscience quick fixes somewhat diminishes the overall tenor. VERDICT There's something for everyone here: adventure, the Cold War, science, and analysis of how melting ice sheets will influence future climates.--Zebulin Evelhoch, NC LIVE, Raleigh
Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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