The Ice at the End of the World

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.

March 4, 2019
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.

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.

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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.)