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"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. 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 [this book], 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."--Dust jacket.… (more)
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> 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."
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)