What do you think?
Rate this book
Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance
Like the adventurer who circled an iceberg to see it on all sides, Mariana Gosnell, former Newsweek reporter and author of Zero Three Bravo , a book about flying a small plane around the United States, explores ice in all its complexity, grandeur, and significance.More brittle than glass, at times stronger than steel, at other times flowing like molasses, ice covers 10 percent of the earth’s land and 7 percent of its oceans. In nature it is found in myriad forms, from the delicate needle ice that crunches underfoot in a winter meadow to the massive, centuries-old ice that forms the world’s glaciers. Scientists theorize that icy comets delivered to Earth the molecules needed to get life started, and ice ages have shaped much of the land as we know it.Here is the whole world of ice, from the freezing of Pleasant Lake in New Hampshire to the breakup of a Vermont river at the onset of spring, from the frozen Antarctic landscape that emperor penguins inhabit to the cold, watery route bowhead whales take between Arctic ice floes. Mariana Gosnell writes about frostbite and about the recently discovered 5,000-year-old body of a man preserved in an Alpine glacier. She discusses the work of scientists who extract cylinders of Greenland ice to study the history of the earth’s climate and try to predict its future. She examines ice in plants, icebergs, icicles, and hail; sea ice and permafrost; ice on Mars and in the rings of Saturn; and several new forms of ice developed in labs. She writes of the many uses humans make of ice, including ice-skating, ice fishing, iceboating, and ice climbing; building ice roads and seeding clouds; making ice castles, ice cubes, and iced desserts. Ice is a sparkling illumination of the natural phenomenon whose ebbs and flows over time have helped form the world we live in. It is a pleasure to read, and important to read—for its natural science and revelations about ice’s influence on our everyday lives, and for what it has to tell us about our environment today and in the future.
576 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
13 people are currently reading
194 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
December 25, 2008
I briefly thought of becoming a glaciologist in my youth...this book brought it back.
There's just so much to know about something that we either take for granted or hate with a passion (except when in drinks). You'll never look at any form of frozen h20 the same way again.
There's just so much to know about something that we either take for granted or hate with a passion (except when in drinks). You'll never look at any form of frozen h20 the same way again.
April 22, 2010
A truly remarkable book: beautifully written, encyclopedic on its topic, unflaggingly interesting, exhaustive without being exhausting.
May 20, 2011
The entire first chapter is her watching a lake freeze and describing everything that happens and why. Amazing look into the science of ice, biology of creatures who must live with it, and its effects on everything from comments to glaciers.
June 7, 2008
Actually pretty interesting. Its easy to pick up and read a little bit and put back down for a while, because each chapter is sort of independent. Plus, you know, ice is awesome.
January 14, 2025
_Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance_ by Mariana Gosnell might as well be titled _Ice: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know but was Afraid to Ask_. This 501-page book of 36 chapters covers every aspect of water ice I could ever imagine and many I didn’t. Organized thematically, there are chapters on the physics of ice, ice in meteorology and climatology, the Ice Ages, ice in sports, river ice, lake ice, sea ice, icebergs, glaciers, ice’s use in medicine, frostbite, hypothermia, ice’s use in various cuisines, the history of the ice trade, how plants and animals handle ice, polar exploration, various Arctic and Antarctic animals particularly associated with ice, ice in soil, snowflakes, frost, icicles, hail, sleet, clouds like cirrus that are made of ice, atmospheric optical effects like halos caused by ice in the atmosphere, icing on aircraft, ice’s effects on military history, why ice is slippery, ice in the solar system, ice sculptures, ice roads, ice cubes in your drinks, ice related festivals, ice palaces, igloos, using ice cores to study climate change; you name it, if it is even tangentially related to ice, it looks like the author covered it.
Doing my best, these are the topics covered in the 36 chapters.
1 (“Lakes”): basics physics of ice, why it floats, how water freezes, the stages of freezing over a lake or pond and the different types of ice at different stages.
2 (“Rivers”): river ice and how rivers freeze, frazil ice, ice as it relates to shipping on rivers and affects dams, and ice bridges.
3 (“Great Lakes”): not just the North American Great Lakes but Lake Baikal in Russia, discussing also seiches and ice volcanoes.
4 (“Loading”): ice roads and how ice supports weight, traveling on ice, ice fishing, and fishing shanties and houses used by ice fishermen. How ice handles weight and how buildings and cars can fall through seemingly solid ice.
5 (“Breakup”): the process where river and lake ice melts, discussion of ice dams, phases of a breakup of ice on a river, candle ice.
6 (“Alps”) alpine glaciers, the science of them, different geological formations associated with them, the history of their study.
7 (“Surging Glaciers”): differences between alpine or mountain glaciers and continental ice sheets, more on geological formations associated with glaciers, how glaciers move.
8 (“West Antarctic Ice Sheet”): pretty much what the chapter title is, discussion also of marine ice sheets and also ice streams.
9 (“Coring”): collecting and studying ice cores for climatology, how they are studied and what they reveal, collecting ice cores in alpine glaciers in the tropics, what we have learned from ice cores about ice formation, the Ice Age, and climate change, and drilling to underground lakes in Antarctica.
10 (“On Glaciers”): a chapter on polar exploration, on Robert Falcon Scott in Antarctica as well as Roald Amundsen, Douglas Mawson, and Sir Edmund Hillary, learn about sastrugi and a lot on crevasses.
11 (“Icebergs I”); the story of the _Titanic_, basics on icebergs, shapes, sizes, formation, movement, monitoring them today to keep ships safe by the International Iceberg Patrol (IIP), differences between icebergs and sea ice, why icebergs have different colors. Mainly on Arctic icebergs.
12 (“Icebergs II”): more on icebergs, much more on Antarctic instead of Arctic icebergs, threats to icebergs to oil rigs, humans moving icebergs, and tracks left in the seafloor by icebergs.
13 (“Sea Ice I”): basic physics of sea ice, its formation, structure both above and below, discussion of terms like ice blink and polynyas. Various polar explorers and sea ice such as Ernest Shackleton. Also discusses the “Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax” with regards to the Eskimos having more than 200 words for snow.
14 (“Sea Ice II”): more modern exploration on and below sea ice, such as by the Soviets, the _Nautilus_ and other submarines trying to reach the North Pole, general information on submarines below Arctic sea ice, quite a bit on icebreakers with the author spending five days on a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
15 (“Ground Ice I”): needle ice, frost heave, ice and pothole formation, frost-pulled objects such as rocks, frost wedging, quite a bit on permafrost including the challenges of building on and living on permafrost.
16 (“Ground Ice II”): various geological formation associated with ground ice, notably pingos, ice caves (caves that have ice in them). Additional discussion of the challenges of living with permafrost.
17 (“Plants”): how plants deal or don’t deal with ice and freezing and the various ways they do so, the science of frost tolerance in plants, how scientists are trying to genetically engineer frost tolerance, farmers dealing with threats to crops (notably citrus), and discussion of such terms as latent heat (a concept that appeared in earlier chapters too).
18 (“Animals I”): three Arctic animals particularly associated with sea ice (bowhead whales, polar bears, and the walrus), also additional discussion of landfast ice versus pack ice.
19 (“Animals II”): seals and ice, starting with the Weddell seal of Antarctica but also discussing ring seals, ribbon seals, bearded seals, spotted seals, harp seals, and sealing/sealers. Learned a lot about seals!
20 (“Animals III”): while chapter 19 covered both Arctic and Antarctic animals, this chapter is entirely on Antarctic animals. Coverage of penguins (especially emperor penguins) as well as the complex ecosystems under, on, and even inside Antarctic sea ice and how animals like fish don’t freeze solid.
21 (“Animals IV”): how insects deal with the cold and ice, how frogs handle it, how warm-blooded mammals and birds deal with ice and cold, also coverage of black guillemots of the Arctic (one of very few birds to winter around ice), the Arctic fox (quoting one researcher who said “the white fox is almost as much of a sea animal as the polar bear” as it spends a lot of time on sea ice), also the beaver.
22 (“Humans I”): medical issues from cold and ice such as freezing to death, what actually is the cause of damage or death from cold, ice, frostbite, dealing with frostbite and hypothermia, and the role hypothermia and frostbite have played in military history.
23 (“Humans II”): the use of ice in medicine to treat pain, in surgery, to preserve organs, the science of cryopreservation, the challenges in preventing tissue damage and thawing out cryopreserved tissue, and the story of Ötzi (a name that I don’t think the author used), the ice-preserved mummy found in 1991 on the Austria-Italy border and dated to 3350 - 3105 BC.
24 (“Games I”): why ice is slippery (surprisingly controversial), the different types of ices used in various sports such as hockey, figure skating, and speed skating and how they are made, the history of skating, iceboats, and a fascinating section on curling (and the type of ice preferred in curling).
25 (“Games II”): sports and activities done on ice “in spite of its slipperiness, not because of it,” such as racing motorcycles on frozen bodies of water, ice climbing, ice diving (scuba diving under ice), and the sport of ice canoeing.
26 (“Uses I”): making lenses out of ice, ice in beverages and use in cuisine, ice cream, the frozen water trade, icehouses, ice cubes, iceboxes, making ice, and using ice in air conditioning.
27 (“Uses II”): the modern-day frozen water trade whether proving ice for the Amish or bag ice or block ice for things like bags of ice sold at grocery stores and convenience stores or flaked ice used to keep fish and seafood fresh (and how such ice is made and why the different types are used). The history of frozen food and the science of freezer burn are also covered.
28 (“Uses III”): ice sculptures (and how ice for ice sculptures if made and why of that type), ice palaces, ice hotels, temporary buildings made of ice for winter carnivals and festivals, igloos, a plan to make an aircraft carrier out of ice in World War II, and the role of ice in studying neutrinos.
29 (“Other Forms of Ice”): other types of ice that exist in either labs or under conditions of high pressure elsewhere in the universe, water ice, but formed at conditions not found naturally on Earth.
30 (“Atmosphere I”): ice storms, sleet, freezing rain, graupel, hail, snow, snowflakes, icing on aircraft whether on the ground or in flight, rime ice versus glaze ice, ice on ships.
31 (“Atmosphere II”): icicles (surprisingly interesting science), frost (also interesting), the rare anti-icicle that forms upwards, and cave crystals made of ice.
32 (“Atmosphere III”): ice in terms of clouds, role in producing lightning, clouds like cirrus and noctilucent that are made of ice, contrails, ice fogs, cloud seeding, and a fascination section on the atmospheric ice and various optical phenomena like halos, sun dogs, sun pillars, as well as some rather rare ones like Parry’s arc and Lowitz’s arc.
33 (“Space I”): water ice in space (“the most abundant solid compound in the solar system”), discussing ice on the moons of Titan, Iapetus, Mimas, Enceladus, Triton, Callisto, Ganymede, quite a bit on Europa, also quite a bit on the complex nature of Saturn’s rings (“90 to 99 percent…water ice”).
34 (“Space II”): ice on and under the surface of Mars, ice on Mercury, ice on the Moon, ice in comets, and how “without water ice, the ingredients needed to get life started on Earth might never have reached the planet at the critical moment” largely thanks to comets.
35 (“Ice Ages”): Earth’s ice ages, the causes and courses of the most recent Ice Age, the complex history and the study of the Laurentide ice sheet (the “biggest ice sheet of the last ice age…the biggest ice sheet ever, so far as we know…as big or bigger than the combined Antarctica ice sheets…now”), what’s left from the last Ice Age in terms of continental ice sheets, will there be another Ice Age in the future.
36 (“Lake of the Woods”): life on a lake in northern Minnesota/southern Ontario/Manitoba, how locals deal with the ice, ice roads in winter, an accident when two people fell through the ice off of an ice road, ice candles (“Kenora is known as the Ice Candle Capital of Canada”), hunting on ice, harvesting ice, and touring an icehouse.
Has an index, a massive bibliography (and frequent mentions of books throughout the text), and a section of black and white plates. Each chapter is strongly thematic and it would be well suited to someone just wanting to read about a particular subject as it relates to ice.
Doing my best, these are the topics covered in the 36 chapters.
1 (“Lakes”): basics physics of ice, why it floats, how water freezes, the stages of freezing over a lake or pond and the different types of ice at different stages.
2 (“Rivers”): river ice and how rivers freeze, frazil ice, ice as it relates to shipping on rivers and affects dams, and ice bridges.
3 (“Great Lakes”): not just the North American Great Lakes but Lake Baikal in Russia, discussing also seiches and ice volcanoes.
4 (“Loading”): ice roads and how ice supports weight, traveling on ice, ice fishing, and fishing shanties and houses used by ice fishermen. How ice handles weight and how buildings and cars can fall through seemingly solid ice.
5 (“Breakup”): the process where river and lake ice melts, discussion of ice dams, phases of a breakup of ice on a river, candle ice.
6 (“Alps”) alpine glaciers, the science of them, different geological formations associated with them, the history of their study.
7 (“Surging Glaciers”): differences between alpine or mountain glaciers and continental ice sheets, more on geological formations associated with glaciers, how glaciers move.
8 (“West Antarctic Ice Sheet”): pretty much what the chapter title is, discussion also of marine ice sheets and also ice streams.
9 (“Coring”): collecting and studying ice cores for climatology, how they are studied and what they reveal, collecting ice cores in alpine glaciers in the tropics, what we have learned from ice cores about ice formation, the Ice Age, and climate change, and drilling to underground lakes in Antarctica.
10 (“On Glaciers”): a chapter on polar exploration, on Robert Falcon Scott in Antarctica as well as Roald Amundsen, Douglas Mawson, and Sir Edmund Hillary, learn about sastrugi and a lot on crevasses.
11 (“Icebergs I”); the story of the _Titanic_, basics on icebergs, shapes, sizes, formation, movement, monitoring them today to keep ships safe by the International Iceberg Patrol (IIP), differences between icebergs and sea ice, why icebergs have different colors. Mainly on Arctic icebergs.
12 (“Icebergs II”): more on icebergs, much more on Antarctic instead of Arctic icebergs, threats to icebergs to oil rigs, humans moving icebergs, and tracks left in the seafloor by icebergs.
13 (“Sea Ice I”): basic physics of sea ice, its formation, structure both above and below, discussion of terms like ice blink and polynyas. Various polar explorers and sea ice such as Ernest Shackleton. Also discusses the “Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax” with regards to the Eskimos having more than 200 words for snow.
14 (“Sea Ice II”): more modern exploration on and below sea ice, such as by the Soviets, the _Nautilus_ and other submarines trying to reach the North Pole, general information on submarines below Arctic sea ice, quite a bit on icebreakers with the author spending five days on a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
15 (“Ground Ice I”): needle ice, frost heave, ice and pothole formation, frost-pulled objects such as rocks, frost wedging, quite a bit on permafrost including the challenges of building on and living on permafrost.
16 (“Ground Ice II”): various geological formation associated with ground ice, notably pingos, ice caves (caves that have ice in them). Additional discussion of the challenges of living with permafrost.
17 (“Plants”): how plants deal or don’t deal with ice and freezing and the various ways they do so, the science of frost tolerance in plants, how scientists are trying to genetically engineer frost tolerance, farmers dealing with threats to crops (notably citrus), and discussion of such terms as latent heat (a concept that appeared in earlier chapters too).
18 (“Animals I”): three Arctic animals particularly associated with sea ice (bowhead whales, polar bears, and the walrus), also additional discussion of landfast ice versus pack ice.
19 (“Animals II”): seals and ice, starting with the Weddell seal of Antarctica but also discussing ring seals, ribbon seals, bearded seals, spotted seals, harp seals, and sealing/sealers. Learned a lot about seals!
20 (“Animals III”): while chapter 19 covered both Arctic and Antarctic animals, this chapter is entirely on Antarctic animals. Coverage of penguins (especially emperor penguins) as well as the complex ecosystems under, on, and even inside Antarctic sea ice and how animals like fish don’t freeze solid.
21 (“Animals IV”): how insects deal with the cold and ice, how frogs handle it, how warm-blooded mammals and birds deal with ice and cold, also coverage of black guillemots of the Arctic (one of very few birds to winter around ice), the Arctic fox (quoting one researcher who said “the white fox is almost as much of a sea animal as the polar bear” as it spends a lot of time on sea ice), also the beaver.
22 (“Humans I”): medical issues from cold and ice such as freezing to death, what actually is the cause of damage or death from cold, ice, frostbite, dealing with frostbite and hypothermia, and the role hypothermia and frostbite have played in military history.
23 (“Humans II”): the use of ice in medicine to treat pain, in surgery, to preserve organs, the science of cryopreservation, the challenges in preventing tissue damage and thawing out cryopreserved tissue, and the story of Ötzi (a name that I don’t think the author used), the ice-preserved mummy found in 1991 on the Austria-Italy border and dated to 3350 - 3105 BC.
24 (“Games I”): why ice is slippery (surprisingly controversial), the different types of ices used in various sports such as hockey, figure skating, and speed skating and how they are made, the history of skating, iceboats, and a fascinating section on curling (and the type of ice preferred in curling).
25 (“Games II”): sports and activities done on ice “in spite of its slipperiness, not because of it,” such as racing motorcycles on frozen bodies of water, ice climbing, ice diving (scuba diving under ice), and the sport of ice canoeing.
26 (“Uses I”): making lenses out of ice, ice in beverages and use in cuisine, ice cream, the frozen water trade, icehouses, ice cubes, iceboxes, making ice, and using ice in air conditioning.
27 (“Uses II”): the modern-day frozen water trade whether proving ice for the Amish or bag ice or block ice for things like bags of ice sold at grocery stores and convenience stores or flaked ice used to keep fish and seafood fresh (and how such ice is made and why the different types are used). The history of frozen food and the science of freezer burn are also covered.
28 (“Uses III”): ice sculptures (and how ice for ice sculptures if made and why of that type), ice palaces, ice hotels, temporary buildings made of ice for winter carnivals and festivals, igloos, a plan to make an aircraft carrier out of ice in World War II, and the role of ice in studying neutrinos.
29 (“Other Forms of Ice”): other types of ice that exist in either labs or under conditions of high pressure elsewhere in the universe, water ice, but formed at conditions not found naturally on Earth.
30 (“Atmosphere I”): ice storms, sleet, freezing rain, graupel, hail, snow, snowflakes, icing on aircraft whether on the ground or in flight, rime ice versus glaze ice, ice on ships.
31 (“Atmosphere II”): icicles (surprisingly interesting science), frost (also interesting), the rare anti-icicle that forms upwards, and cave crystals made of ice.
32 (“Atmosphere III”): ice in terms of clouds, role in producing lightning, clouds like cirrus and noctilucent that are made of ice, contrails, ice fogs, cloud seeding, and a fascination section on the atmospheric ice and various optical phenomena like halos, sun dogs, sun pillars, as well as some rather rare ones like Parry’s arc and Lowitz’s arc.
33 (“Space I”): water ice in space (“the most abundant solid compound in the solar system”), discussing ice on the moons of Titan, Iapetus, Mimas, Enceladus, Triton, Callisto, Ganymede, quite a bit on Europa, also quite a bit on the complex nature of Saturn’s rings (“90 to 99 percent…water ice”).
34 (“Space II”): ice on and under the surface of Mars, ice on Mercury, ice on the Moon, ice in comets, and how “without water ice, the ingredients needed to get life started on Earth might never have reached the planet at the critical moment” largely thanks to comets.
35 (“Ice Ages”): Earth’s ice ages, the causes and courses of the most recent Ice Age, the complex history and the study of the Laurentide ice sheet (the “biggest ice sheet of the last ice age…the biggest ice sheet ever, so far as we know…as big or bigger than the combined Antarctica ice sheets…now”), what’s left from the last Ice Age in terms of continental ice sheets, will there be another Ice Age in the future.
36 (“Lake of the Woods”): life on a lake in northern Minnesota/southern Ontario/Manitoba, how locals deal with the ice, ice roads in winter, an accident when two people fell through the ice off of an ice road, ice candles (“Kenora is known as the Ice Candle Capital of Canada”), hunting on ice, harvesting ice, and touring an icehouse.
Has an index, a massive bibliography (and frequent mentions of books throughout the text), and a section of black and white plates. Each chapter is strongly thematic and it would be well suited to someone just wanting to read about a particular subject as it relates to ice.
January 3, 2019
I found this book after seeing so-called "lake stars" or "ice spiders" on the river ice in the backwaters of the Mississippi (look them up!). In trying to understand their origin, this book seems to be the only pop-sci approach explaining ice stars, in the early chapters on lake ice. (They're caused by water sloshing in and out of tiny holes in the ice surface, created possibly by high-albedo sticks burrowing through the ice)
Who, exactly, is this book for? In "Ice," Mariana Gosnell explores an eccentric laundry list of topics, all of which are connected by some tangent to ice, and many of which could be (and are) stand-alone books. From arctic exploration, to glaciology, snowflakes, the history of ice-selling, and unusual outdoor sports, "Ice" covers a lot of ground. With such a broad range of interests and relative lack of structure, the amount of information dedicated to any one topic is as superficial as the ice it discusses. Who is both interested in all of that, and willing to span this long read (500+ pages, twice the length of comparable natural histories) to cover them?
Me. The answer is me.
I love this kind of natural history book, where the topic is so large and poorly defined that the author has freedom to write about whatever they find interesting. (Classics in this micro-genre include William Bryant Logan's "Dirt" and "Air.") Gosnell certainly gets sucked into certain topics, like ice and the aviation industry (which, based off her other book about solo flying, is a personal interest of hers). However, her fascinations never become tiring, thanks both due to the constant changing subjects, and to the obvious care that she puts into making the topic interesting and understandable.
I especially enjoyed the sections about polar and glacial geomorphology. In these Gosnell goes into great depth about the processes that create those unusual landforms, with a focus on the scientific uncertainties and the mechanical movements involved. This is the exact kind of science reporting I would like to see more of, focusing less on the results and more on the "how and why and what we don't know."
This book makes a great companion piece to Heinrich's book "Winter World," which I also recently read. Where Heinrich goes deep into how animals survive the (northern US) winter, Gosnell writes about how the ice itself behaves. Together, they give a whole understanding of what's happening out there this time of year.
Who, exactly, is this book for? In "Ice," Mariana Gosnell explores an eccentric laundry list of topics, all of which are connected by some tangent to ice, and many of which could be (and are) stand-alone books. From arctic exploration, to glaciology, snowflakes, the history of ice-selling, and unusual outdoor sports, "Ice" covers a lot of ground. With such a broad range of interests and relative lack of structure, the amount of information dedicated to any one topic is as superficial as the ice it discusses. Who is both interested in all of that, and willing to span this long read (500+ pages, twice the length of comparable natural histories) to cover them?
Me. The answer is me.
I love this kind of natural history book, where the topic is so large and poorly defined that the author has freedom to write about whatever they find interesting. (Classics in this micro-genre include William Bryant Logan's "Dirt" and "Air.") Gosnell certainly gets sucked into certain topics, like ice and the aviation industry (which, based off her other book about solo flying, is a personal interest of hers). However, her fascinations never become tiring, thanks both due to the constant changing subjects, and to the obvious care that she puts into making the topic interesting and understandable.
I especially enjoyed the sections about polar and glacial geomorphology. In these Gosnell goes into great depth about the processes that create those unusual landforms, with a focus on the scientific uncertainties and the mechanical movements involved. This is the exact kind of science reporting I would like to see more of, focusing less on the results and more on the "how and why and what we don't know."
This book makes a great companion piece to Heinrich's book "Winter World," which I also recently read. Where Heinrich goes deep into how animals survive the (northern US) winter, Gosnell writes about how the ice itself behaves. Together, they give a whole understanding of what's happening out there this time of year.
March 20, 2019
The most difficult part of writing this review is avoiding the deluge of ice puns that could result. So instead of saying that Ice is a cool book, we could say that Ice by Mariana Gosnell covers an interesting subject. Since I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I am somewhat familiar with the phenomenon known as ice. Going into this work, I knew that ice floats since it is less dense than water, I knew that this was a very good thing, and I knew that ice was refreshing in beverages. While I am not exactly stupid, I do admit that ice is something that I never really gave much thought to. I even knew that ice could be dangerous; practically everyone has heard of the Titanic disaster and how an iceberg sheared a hole through steel plates.
Gosnell delves deep into the science of ice by providing information gleaned from a wide swath of disciplines. So she talks about the actual structure of ice, the method and conditions of how it forms, the little names that people have for different forms of ice, and little tidbits of how ice is useful or terrifying. Take this, for example, I never thought about rivers freezing over, but it happens. I guess I thought that the flow of water would impede it or something, but that doesn’t stop the freezing process. In fact, it goes on to carry the ice downstream, sometimes creating massive floods if the ice blocks a pipe.
This book leaves no stone unturned in talking about ice in all of its glory. From frozen lakes and rivers to massive glaciers and mountains, ice can be found in many places. It can even be useful in finding out about atmospheric changes. If you take a coring of ice and analyze it, it is possible to find out many things about the period when that ice froze. Alongside all of this information are little asides from poems, plays, and novels on the beauty and power of ice. That is my one problem with this book though. It seems like the little creative pieces on ice would work to separate paragraphs or ideas, but that doesn’t exactly happen. The book finishes a paragraph, moves on to a quote by Shakespeare that pertains to ice, and moves on to the same chain of thought with a new paragraph. A lot of works have dealt with ice, which isn’t really surprising.
So in the sense of being informative, the book is great. It is quite exhaustive and the stories it tells are interesting in their own right. Some of the stories are pretty sad, but that is what you get for underestimating Mother Nature. I recall that short story by Jack London, To Build a Fire. In the face of incredible cold and the danger of the Alaskan wilderness, the man is referred to as a nameless agent. He is unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and when he tries to overdo it he dies nameless and faceless. All in all, I would rate this book pretty highly.
Gosnell delves deep into the science of ice by providing information gleaned from a wide swath of disciplines. So she talks about the actual structure of ice, the method and conditions of how it forms, the little names that people have for different forms of ice, and little tidbits of how ice is useful or terrifying. Take this, for example, I never thought about rivers freezing over, but it happens. I guess I thought that the flow of water would impede it or something, but that doesn’t stop the freezing process. In fact, it goes on to carry the ice downstream, sometimes creating massive floods if the ice blocks a pipe.
This book leaves no stone unturned in talking about ice in all of its glory. From frozen lakes and rivers to massive glaciers and mountains, ice can be found in many places. It can even be useful in finding out about atmospheric changes. If you take a coring of ice and analyze it, it is possible to find out many things about the period when that ice froze. Alongside all of this information are little asides from poems, plays, and novels on the beauty and power of ice. That is my one problem with this book though. It seems like the little creative pieces on ice would work to separate paragraphs or ideas, but that doesn’t exactly happen. The book finishes a paragraph, moves on to a quote by Shakespeare that pertains to ice, and moves on to the same chain of thought with a new paragraph. A lot of works have dealt with ice, which isn’t really surprising.
So in the sense of being informative, the book is great. It is quite exhaustive and the stories it tells are interesting in their own right. Some of the stories are pretty sad, but that is what you get for underestimating Mother Nature. I recall that short story by Jack London, To Build a Fire. In the face of incredible cold and the danger of the Alaskan wilderness, the man is referred to as a nameless agent. He is unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and when he tries to overdo it he dies nameless and faceless. All in all, I would rate this book pretty highly.
February 11, 2018
An amazing and comprehensive book on a fascinating often overlooked substance
Some time ago, I became interested in how ice was harvested, transported and stored in the years before the advent of electricity. I couldn’t find much on the topic and so filed it away unresolved. Recently, I stumbled upon Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance, by Mariana Gosnell and wondered if it would answer my questions. It did, and so much more.
This is, hands down, one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read. Gosnell is a tremendous writer who tackles the surprisingly complex subject of ice with amazing depth of knowledge, a broad scope and an approachable style that makes a long book (the hardback lists 576 pages) zip by. From how ice forms to how it behaves in extreme environments, from under the ice caps of Earth to inside craters at the poles of Mercury, from kitchen refrigerators to turn-of-the-century ice houses (finally, I get it!), from ice breakers to ice trucks, from icy noctilucent clouds to snowflakes, from speed skaters to skiers, from polar bears to penguins, this book should not be missed.
The one tiny complaint I have is that the descriptive, haunting scene of an ice truck crashing through an ostensibly frozen Siberian lake, and the colleagues of the doomed driver standing around the edge of the hole watching the headlights sink slowly out of sight in the inky water, will stick with me. In fact, I read most of this book on a trip to Lapland in northern Finland to see the aurora borealis (mission accomplished). Lapland knows a little something about ice, especially in the winter when the temps hover below zero and sunlight only lasts a few hours. We decided to take a dog sled ride. It was -30 F and as the dogs set out across the frozen lake, we hit a puddle of water (no doubt thawed by thin ice below us and warm currents circulating near the surface from trapped heat). As we splashed through the unexpected water, I had a horrific, gut-sick feeling that we were going through, never to be heard from again. The dogs didn’t seem to even notice, just kept trundling along.
Short of possibly giving you icy nightmares, I found this book to be extremely enjoyable and informative. Even if you aren’t interested in ice now, you will be by the time you finish this book. Don’t miss it.
Some time ago, I became interested in how ice was harvested, transported and stored in the years before the advent of electricity. I couldn’t find much on the topic and so filed it away unresolved. Recently, I stumbled upon Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance, by Mariana Gosnell and wondered if it would answer my questions. It did, and so much more.
This is, hands down, one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read. Gosnell is a tremendous writer who tackles the surprisingly complex subject of ice with amazing depth of knowledge, a broad scope and an approachable style that makes a long book (the hardback lists 576 pages) zip by. From how ice forms to how it behaves in extreme environments, from under the ice caps of Earth to inside craters at the poles of Mercury, from kitchen refrigerators to turn-of-the-century ice houses (finally, I get it!), from ice breakers to ice trucks, from icy noctilucent clouds to snowflakes, from speed skaters to skiers, from polar bears to penguins, this book should not be missed.
The one tiny complaint I have is that the descriptive, haunting scene of an ice truck crashing through an ostensibly frozen Siberian lake, and the colleagues of the doomed driver standing around the edge of the hole watching the headlights sink slowly out of sight in the inky water, will stick with me. In fact, I read most of this book on a trip to Lapland in northern Finland to see the aurora borealis (mission accomplished). Lapland knows a little something about ice, especially in the winter when the temps hover below zero and sunlight only lasts a few hours. We decided to take a dog sled ride. It was -30 F and as the dogs set out across the frozen lake, we hit a puddle of water (no doubt thawed by thin ice below us and warm currents circulating near the surface from trapped heat). As we splashed through the unexpected water, I had a horrific, gut-sick feeling that we were going through, never to be heard from again. The dogs didn’t seem to even notice, just kept trundling along.
Short of possibly giving you icy nightmares, I found this book to be extremely enjoyable and informative. Even if you aren’t interested in ice now, you will be by the time you finish this book. Don’t miss it.
May 27, 2020
This has become my most favorite book! Gosnell is an amazing writer, and I was saddened to realized she'd passed years ago. You'd never think the subject of ice could be so expansive and compelling, but this book is absolutely spellbinding. She also includes literary passages on most pages as transitions between paragraphs. A true delight that I cannot recommend highly enough.
March 17, 2024
Who knew there were so many things that involve ice. Very interesting read if you're into science/biology. Really enjoyed it.
Read
January 2, 2026bratz-maribel
October 4, 2017
Tremendous!
Filling something like 500 pages, this extensive and intimate portrait of ice (we're talking cold, hard water) is a truly amazing piece of journalism. Fantastically researched, this book covers nearly all imaginable aspects of ice--from the freezing of lakes, rivers, and ponds in temperate regions; to the conditions of the arctic and antarctic. From the chemistry of naturally occurring ice; to the chemistry (and existence) of ices II-XIII, the laboratory-made ices. From human ice sports to the activities (survival and recreational) of the ice dwelling animals; from ice-related meteorological phenomena as well as the behavior of ice underground...it's all there, and it's all fascinating. Each section is divided by brief literary excerpts, all alluding to ice in some way. The prose is extremely readable and accessible to the non-expert, and the language throught has a tone of respect for the substance at hand. Mariana Gosnell receives all my admiration!
(However, the section covering pagophagia, one of the reasons I originally picked up the book, was admittedly brief!)
Filling something like 500 pages, this extensive and intimate portrait of ice (we're talking cold, hard water) is a truly amazing piece of journalism. Fantastically researched, this book covers nearly all imaginable aspects of ice--from the freezing of lakes, rivers, and ponds in temperate regions; to the conditions of the arctic and antarctic. From the chemistry of naturally occurring ice; to the chemistry (and existence) of ices II-XIII, the laboratory-made ices. From human ice sports to the activities (survival and recreational) of the ice dwelling animals; from ice-related meteorological phenomena as well as the behavior of ice underground...it's all there, and it's all fascinating. Each section is divided by brief literary excerpts, all alluding to ice in some way. The prose is extremely readable and accessible to the non-expert, and the language throught has a tone of respect for the substance at hand. Mariana Gosnell receives all my admiration!
(However, the section covering pagophagia, one of the reasons I originally picked up the book, was admittedly brief!)
Read
May 11, 2009Took me forever to get through--not because the book was boring (it wasn't), but because I was so busy that I was reading it in tiny snippets, sometimes no more than a paragraph at a time. So it seemed a little slow, but that's probably an artifact of having taken so long to read it rather than of Mariana Gosnell's writing.
I did notice that some editor wasn't doing his or her job properly; I ran across a strangely high number of punctuation errors (weird ones, like commas just being plunked down in the middle of a sentence for absolutely no discernible reason) and a couple of instances of subject-verb disagreement. There weren't enough errors to be off-puttingly intrusive, but...well, I did notice them.
Other than that, good stuff. The parts about glaciers pleasantly recalled my beloved Geology sequence from college; the chapter on plants was just plain fascinating. Gosnell came at the subject from angles that would never even have occurred to me, and there were no sections that I found boring or unnecessary. Enjoyable.
I did notice that some editor wasn't doing his or her job properly; I ran across a strangely high number of punctuation errors (weird ones, like commas just being plunked down in the middle of a sentence for absolutely no discernible reason) and a couple of instances of subject-verb disagreement. There weren't enough errors to be off-puttingly intrusive, but...well, I did notice them.
Other than that, good stuff. The parts about glaciers pleasantly recalled my beloved Geology sequence from college; the chapter on plants was just plain fascinating. Gosnell came at the subject from angles that would never even have occurred to me, and there were no sections that I found boring or unnecessary. Enjoyable.
April 16, 2012
I've recently developed an interest in Alpine glaciers and this book was recommended to me. It deals with ice in all its forms, from ice cubes to glaciers to ice sculptures and even ice in outer space (although, oddly, the book doesn't cover snow). For Gosnell, ice became somewhat of an obsession in the same way that Mark Kurlansky became obsessed with salt in his meticulously comprehensive work, Salt: A World History.
The writing ranges from lyrical and evocative to mundane, with the author analyzing the structure, formation and peculiar behavior of ice crystals, then recounting well-known anecdotes about Roger Bacon, the Titanic and Scott's attempt to reach the South Pole. I have to say it kept me interested but sometimes I felt as though she was just compiling facts and stories without tying them to a central theme. Her research is exhaustive, her writing skillful, but this could have been a shorter, more concise book.
The writing ranges from lyrical and evocative to mundane, with the author analyzing the structure, formation and peculiar behavior of ice crystals, then recounting well-known anecdotes about Roger Bacon, the Titanic and Scott's attempt to reach the South Pole. I have to say it kept me interested but sometimes I felt as though she was just compiling facts and stories without tying them to a central theme. Her research is exhaustive, her writing skillful, but this could have been a shorter, more concise book.
January 13, 2012
In my opinion this is the ultimate book for ice lovers! I was fascinated by all those surprising features of ice and the immense amount of information on ice the author collected for this book. You just want to go out on cold days and explore for yorself what you have just read about. I could not get enough of it. Certainly a must-read for anybody interested in this astonishing substance.
March 6, 2007
This book was really fascinating - ice is actually a pretty freaky substance because it's less dense as a solid than as a liquid. And if it weren't, a lot of the natural world would look way different.
Also, polar bears.
Also, polar bears.
December 31, 2013
Full of interesting and facts about just about any aspect of ice you could care to imagine. The book sometimes feels a bit disorganised, more of a collection of essays containing an assortment of facts and anecdotes than a structured book. Nonetheless Ice is an enjoyable and informative read.
June 1, 2016
Gosnell writes what must be the most definitive popular study of ice ever. She looks at ice from the vantage point of weather, natural history, science, business, and even literature. In every case it's fascinating and insightful.
June 1, 2009
"Ice, and again ice."
"It may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool his drink in the next."
"It may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool his drink in the next."
May 31, 2011
who knew a simple thing like frozen water could be so complex.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews