The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future
- ISBN-10
- 0812986547
- ISBN-13
- 9780812986549
- Series
- The Ice at the End of the World
- Category
- Science
- Pages
- 448
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-07-14
- Publisher
- Random House Trade Paperbacks
- Author
- Jon Gertner
Description
A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change “Jon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited. The result is a gripping and important book.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning 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 Greenland—at 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. Greenland’s ice doesn’t just tell us where we’ve been. More urgently, it tells us where we’re headed. In The Ice at the End of the World, Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earth’s last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory. The history of Greenland’s ice begins with the explorers who arrived here at the turn of the twentieth century—first on foot, then on skis, then on crude, motorized sleds—and embarked on grueling expeditions that took as long as a year and often ended in frostbitten tragedy. Their original goal was simple: to conquer Greenland’s seemingly infinite interior. Yet their efforts eventually gave way to scientists who built lonely encampments out on the ice and began drilling—one mile, two miles down. Their aim was to pull up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of earth’s 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 it’s too late. As Greenland’s 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 Arctic’s explorers and researchers with a transporting, deeply intelligent style—and 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.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption
By Dahr JamailLike no other book, The End of Ice offers a firsthand chronicle—including photographs throughout of Jamail on his journey across the world—of the catastrophic reality of our situation and the incalculable necessity of relishing this ...
-
The Ice at the Bottom of the World: Stories
By Mark RichardIn these ten stories, Mark Richard, winner of the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, emerges as the heir apparent to Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner.
-
Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night
By Julian SanctonIn the darkness, plagued by a mysterious illness and besieged by monotony, they descended into madness. In Madhouse at the End of the Earth, Julian Sancton unfolds an epic story of adventure and horror for the ages.
-
The Ice at the End of the World: Longest Journey, The
By Robert SiegelAs Hralekana, the wounded humpback whale, confronts the kraken and leads his pod in search of food, his human friend Mark, on board, the Rainbow Whale, faces warships preparing to explode a nuclear device which is accidentally dropped in a ...
-
The Book of Ice
By DJ Spooky That Subliminal KidSome of my favorite science fiction, like Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica or Crawford Kilian's Icequake, deals with Antarctica using some of the same themes: science, art and the weirdly un-worldliness of the ice terrain.
-
A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic
By P. WadhamsIce, the magic crystal -- A brief history of ice on planet Earth -- The modern cycle of ice ages -- The greenhouse effect -- Sea ice meltback begins -- The future of Arctic sea ice the death spiral -- The accelerating effects of Arctic ...
-
Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages
By Doug MacdougallFrozen Earth also chronicles how the concept of the ice age has gripped the imagination of scientists for almost two centuries.
-
A World Without Ice
By Henry Pollack Ph.D.A World Without Ice answers our most urgent questions about this pending crisis, laying out the necessary steps for managing the unavoidable and avoiding the unmanageable.
-
The Hidden Life of Ice: Dispatches from a Disappearing World
By Marco Tedesco, Alberto Flores d'ArcaisThis is an urgent tribute to an awe-inspiring place that may be gone all too soon.
-
The Islands at the End of the World
By Austin AslanA powerful story enriched by fascinating elements of Hawaiian ecology, culture, and warfare, this captivating and dramatic debut from Austin Aslan is the first of two novels.