A captivating, essential book to add to the necessarily burgeoning literature on global warming.
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.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9662-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both...
Italian theoretical physicist Rovelli (General Relativity: The Most Beautiful of Theories, 2015, etc.) shares his thoughts on the broader scientific and philosophical implications of the great revolution that has taken place over the past century.
These seven lessons, which first appeared as articles in the Sunday supplement of the Italian newspaper Sole 24 Ore, are addressed to readers with little knowledge of physics. In less than 100 pages, the author, who teaches physics in both France and the United States, cogently covers the great accomplishments of the past and the open questions still baffling physicists today. In the first lesson, he focuses on Einstein's theory of general relativity. He describes Einstein's recognition that gravity "is not diffused through space [but] is that space itself" as "a stroke of pure genius." In the second lesson, Rovelli deals with the puzzling features of quantum physics that challenge our picture of reality. In the remaining sections, the author introduces the constant fluctuations of atoms, the granular nature of space, and more. "It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy—or in our physics,” he writes. Rovelli also discusses the issues raised in loop quantum gravity, a theory that he co-developed. These issues lead to his extraordinary claim that the passage of time is not fundamental but rather derived from the granular nature of space. The author suggests that there have been two separate pathways throughout human history: mythology and the accumulation of knowledge through observation. He believes that scientists today share the same curiosity about nature exhibited by early man.
An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both scientists and general readers.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-18441-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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