The ice at the end of the world An epic journey into Greenland's buried past and our perilous future

Review by Choice Review

Best-selling author Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, CH, Sep'12, 50-0251) here presents the gripping story of unlocking the climate secrets of the Greenland ice sheet, in two parts: Explorations (1888--1931), and Investigations (1949--2018). Early explorers crossed its vast expanse on sleds employing dog teams, to collect weather data and begin probing its icy depth to ascertain its dimensions, age, and movements. After the establishment of Thule Air Force Base, long ice cores were drilled, enabling collection of climate information dating back over 400,000 years. The ice cores provide a vast array of scientific data about past climate changes and reversals as well as industrial pollution. The Greenland ice sheet is the largest scientific laboratory of climate change, and today's evidence of its rapid melting is a prelude to future drastic change. Gertner warns that the melting of existing ice sheets may lead to their collapse, causing a sea level rise of 20 feet by 2100, thus impacting coastal populations, economic systems, ocean currents, and weather patterns worldwide. His study reads like a wonderfully written mystery novel, yet it is based on extensive archival and oral history research. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --James Bushnell Richardson, emeritus, University of Pittsburgh

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

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Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 4, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

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.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this remarkably thorough account, Gertner (The Idea Factory), a New York Times Magazine contributor, narrates Greenland's 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 "lunatic" Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansen's 1888 trek across Greenland's frozen tundra. Scientists began flocking there in 1930 to study glaciers, eventually turning to "deep core drilling" to extract ice samples from as far as a mile down. By the 1990s, equipment sophisticated enough for "meticulous, year-by-year reading of the layers of ice" found evidence of "abrupt climate change" 17,500 years ago, in a potential omen of environmental catastrophe to come. More recently, a NASA satellite able to weigh Greenland's ice sheet discovered, alarmingly, that it is "losing well over one hundred billion tons of ice per year." 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. (Jun.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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 quadrilliontons 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 Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Introduction The View from Above   Late one afternoon in April 2015, I found myself standing on the side of a desolate airport runway in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, looking west toward an overcast sky. Next to me stood a group of NASA employees, all of them scanning the same gray clouds. There wasn't much small talk. As the temperatures dipped below freezing, we blew on our hands and kept our eyes fixed on the horizon. "We're running late," Luci Crittenden, a NASA flight operations engineer, finally declared. She looked down at her watch, then stomped her feet to keep off the chill.   Not long after, we heard a dull roar in the distance. And soon enough, we could see it coming--a stout-bellied U.S. Army C-130, trailing a plume of black exhaust. "Uh-oh, I think it's on fire," a woman standing next to me, Caitlin Barnes, remarked. I knew this was a joke--sort of. When the aircraft landed a few minutes later, the problem as far as I could tell wasn't an overheated engine, but old age. The plane taxied down the runaway, made a quick hairpin turn, and came to a vibrating halt in front of us, its rotating propellers making a thunderous racket. If a dozen rusted rivets had popped off the fuse­lage, or if a wheel from the landing gear had rolled off, I would not have been surprised. The machine looked positively ancient.   No one said much. But then Jhony Zavaleta, a NASA project manager, yelled over the din: "Nineteen sixty-five!"   Apparently, this was the year the aircraft had been built. I wasn't sure if Zavaleta was amazed by the fact or alarmed. And in some ways it didn't matter now. For the next few weeks, barring any mishap, the C-130 would fly this group around Greenland, six days a week, eight hours a day. It had spent months in the United States being custom­ized for the task. Under the wings, belly, and nose cone were the world's most sophisticated radar, laser, and optical photography instruments--the tools used for NASA "IceBridge" missions, like this one. The agency's strategy was to fly a specially equipped aircraft over the frozen landscapes of the Arctic so that a team of scientists could collect data on the ice below.   The IceBridge program had come into existence at a moment when the world's ice was melting at an astonishing rate. Our plane's instruments would measure how much the glaciers in Greenland had thinned from previous years, but the trend was already becom­ing obvious: On average, nearly 300 billion tons of ice and water were lost from Greenland every year, and the pace appeared to be accelerating. Yet it was also true that hundreds of billions of tons meant almost nothing in the vast expanse of the Arctic. The ice covering Greenland, known as the Greenland ice sheet, is about 1,500 miles long and almost 700 miles wide, comprising an area of 660,000 square miles; it is composed of nearly three quadrillion--that is, 3,000,000,000,000,000--tons of ice. In some places, it runs to a depth of two miles.1 And so the larger concern, at least as I saw it, was not what was happening in Greenland in 2015, or even what might take place five or ten years hence. It was the idea that some­thing had been set in motion, something immense and catastrophic that could not be easily stopped.   Ice sheet collapse was not a topic of everyday conversations in New York or London. Even if you happened to know some of the more unnerving details--about rapidly retreating glaciers, for in­stance, or about computer forecasts that suggested the Arctic's future could be calamitous--it was easier to think of the decline in ice as a faraway dripping sound, the white noise of a warming world. Still, by the time I signed on with the IceBridge team, the fate of the world's frozen regions seemed to me perhaps the most crucial scientific and economic question of the age: The glaciers are going, but how fast? The ice disappearing from Greenland, along with ice falling off distant glaciers in Antarctica, would inevitably raise sea levels and drown the great coastal cities that a global civilization--living amidst the as­sumption of steady climates and constant shorelines--had built over the course of centuries. But again, the pressing question: How soon would that world, our world, confront the floods?   Not long after the C-130 landed, we clambered up a staircase and stepped into the passenger cabin. We entered a long, cavernous room with a grime-streaked floor that smelled strongly of engine oil. Elec­trical cables snaked up the walls. Arctic survival packs swung from a ceiling net. I noticed a crude, freestanding lavatory toward the back of the room; an old drip coffeemaker and microwave oven were se­cured to a table along the far wall, with Domino Sugar sacks piled high on a pallet underneath. Positioned in the center of the cabin, in front of several rows of seats, were banks of gleaming computer con­soles and high-resolution screens. And bolted to the floor was a mas­sive instrument that resembled a cargo container you might attach to the roof of your car to haul gear on a vacation. This was a laser tool--an altimeter--to measure the height of the ice below.   On the outside, the plane looked ready for the scrapyard. On the inside, it was a fortress of technology. I took another look around. The science team was already logging on to the computers, readying themselves for the schedule of flight missions that the IceBridge team would follow this year. The pilots, with fresh crewcuts, were introduced to us as aces recruited from the navy and air force. Then they, too, excused themselves so they could check the instruments in the cockpit and get ready.   The first flight, I was told, would leave the following morning at eight-thirty sharp. "Be here or be left behind," John Sonntag, the mission leader and a native Texan, told me after we walked back out to the tarmac. Sonntag had been deployed to Greenland more times than he could properly recall. He had an easy manner, a friendly grin. But he meant what he said. The work was too important to accept delays. His team had come here, pretty much to the end of the world, to understand how and why trillions of tons of ice were melting into the ocean. They were not acting on the assumption that they would soon find out, but with each flight and yearly mission, the data piled up: ice lost; water gained. The goal was to gather more and more evidence in the hope that it would ultimately lead us toward an answer--before it was too late. Excerpted from The Ice at the End of the World: Greenland's Secret Past and Earth's Perilous Future by Jon Gertner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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