Curiously (given my fondness for books on polar exploration), I enjoyed the second part of this book, which describes in depth the techniques and politics of glaciology and other ice-related sciences, more than the introductory description of early European and American exploration of Greenland. I guess I prefer detailed stories of individual expeditions more than short versions of multiple explorers (I prefer novels to short stories, so I suppose that makes sense in a way).

My already not-very-high opinion of Robert Peary fell even more when I read of how he extracted two meteorites and sold them to raise funds for his future explorations. Nice for him, but not so great for the local populations who lost their only source of metal for making weapons and tools. And it was sad to read how Alfred Wegener, who developed the theory of Pangaea and continental drift as I learned in [b:Assembling California|19898|Assembling California|John McPhee|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388306591l/19898._SX50_.jpg|26821], died in an effort to bring supplies to his colleagues in the interior before winter set in.

But what really fascinated me was the detailed descriptions of how the significance of ice cores became obvious, the progress of the technology for their extraction, the implications of the enormous weight of the ice on the ground in Greenland, and the integration of land and air based methods of improving our understanding of exactly what goes on with all that ice. Most importantly, the all too scary prospect of what could happen to low-lying cities, and even countries, if major ice sheets in Greenland or Antarctica break off.

That information is all very well presented, and if it interests you, you can skip the first part of the book without missing anything. ( )

Excellent book that gives a historical perspective to the science behind global warming. ( )

Well written, engaging and accesible history of the exploration of Greenland and of the impact of global warming on the ice sheet in Greenland. ( )

As one who tends to find much modern scientific writing drole and unappealing, the book was a nice bridge between the action driven history I enjoy as much as a bag of chips; and the modern science I know I should know more of but tend to avoid (like the can of green beans I just keep not opening).

That said, this very much seems like two different books, merged into one book.

The first part focuses on the early victorian era of heroic manly-men artic explorers and the role of greenland as a testing ground for men often more famous for later exploits at the poles. On that level, it was a griping good read of adventure history--and well worth the read.

Then the book shifts gear, and more significantly tone, as it moves on from the age of adventurous explorers, to institutional research. The through-line is the growth in knowledge of Greenland in particular, and glaciology and the artic regions in general. It was very interesting to read of the role of Greenland in the cold war now that some distance has been gained from the time, and how those military activities actually fed and in many ways birthed the climate science of the 70s -90s. The material covering the research in the 2000s can't avoid the politicization that has tainted the whole topic, but the author does a decent job of trying to let the research and observations speak for themselves. On this point, for those given to see bogey-man behind every climate change rock, this would be well worth a read for showing how the science of today really is a consistent next-step with the long-chain of what we've been learning over the last 100, 150 years.

(2021, Review #2)

I had hoped to learn much more about current Arctic research: the people, the techniques, the results. Toward the end, there are some details about why ice-core drilling is tricky. But the large majority of the book focuses on older history, especially on early trips across Greenland. This is fine, just not what I had expected.

> Years later, Freuchen would remember these moments—the harsh weather, the dwindling provisions, and Rasmussen's inexplicable good humor. "Nothing draws men closer than to hunger together, to see death in each other's eyes," he wrote. "Lying together in snow huts during snowstorms of many days' duration, waiting for better weather, and seeking to drown our hunger by each telling the other everything he knows—then you pour out your life."

> The men stored barrels of fuel near the derrick—not because they needed to burn it, but because they had come to understand that it was necessary to fill the deep hole they were making with fluid that held a density equal to ice. That way, the hole wouldn't close up on them. The ice sheet tended to seal itself like that. If you were drilling deep and weren't careful the ice would grip your bit, freeze it in place, and not let go

> Dansgaard began some of this work in 1952, when he collected rainwater in his yard with a beer bottle and a funnel. What he then began to understand was that warm weather storms produce moisture with a higher percentage of "heavy" 18 O than cold weather storms.

> Henri Bader had piggybacked on the U.S. military's Arctic programs to fund his research efforts, but by the late 1960s, the United States became engaged with the Soviet Union in a different manner—from a distance, rather than up close, due to the development of longer-range ballistic missiles and bombers. Thule's air base was reduced both in size and scope, and dollars for the American military began flowing toward other geographic regions.

> an electrical conductivity test. By moving two electrodes along the ice, they could run a current through a core segment and note the response to the voltage, which varies from season to season due to dust particles, and which can jump in sections where the ice is suffused with acidic volcanic residue. "There's this eruption that shows up in the electrical conductivity test that we call the Caesar volcano [newly reported to be Okmok, in Alaska!], because it's pretty close to 42 B.C.," says Steffensen. "Plinius the Elder wrote that when Caesar was killed the gods were so ashamed of what Rome did that they hid the sun behind a red veil for an entire year.

> The notion that carbon dioxide could trap energy close to earth's surface and thereby warm the planet actually dated back more than a hundred years—to the research (in 1856) of an American named Eunice Foote; to the lab experiments (in 1859) of a British scientist named John Tyndall; and to the calculations (in 1896) of a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius. In 1938, a British engineer named Guy Callendar evaluated thousands of weather measurements and put forward proof that the world's industrial emissions were already warming the earth

> In a paper published in 1967, two scientists working at a government funded laboratory in Washington, Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald, explained how they had created a crude but effective model to simulate earth's atmosphere and see what would happen if atmospheric CO 2 levels in the future doubled from their concentrations from before the industrial revolution. This, the first computer modeling study of climate change—unknown to the general public, but later voted by earth scientists as the most important climate paper ever published—showed that global temperatures would go up on average by 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit

> The date is "11.7," or 11,700 years ago. Core 1678—a half-cylinder—is broken in places where chunks have been cut for research. It is a strangely unattractive piece of ice: discolored, clouded with dust, uneven. "See how wide the bands are spaced here?" asks Fitzpatrick, pointing to one end of the core. "And then: Boom. All of a sudden they get tighter here." She points again from one side of the ice core to the other to emphasize how it shows temperatures and snowfalls began leaping to a new state that was ultimately about 18 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. "So that's it," she says. "Ice age here. Not ice age there. We think this was in the space of a few years. And the whole point is, we all once thought that would take thousands of years."

> "If you look at the modern warming of the Arctic, in a five-year period from 2007 to 2012, we see a doubling of the length of the summer in the eastern Arctic, and that is equivalent to a 5° centigrade rise in temperature in less than five years," says Paul Mayewski, who had been in charge of the GISP-2 drilling project twenty-five years before. "There is no doubt that that is an abrupt climate change event."

> "It's so beautiful, so clean in the ice core records. And you can just see: This lead is human caused. And then you see: This is when humans decided that we didn't want to do that anymore." ( )