What do you think?
Rate this book
Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past
Imagine a world of wildly escalating temperatures, apocalyptic flooding, devastating storms and catastrophic sea levels. This might sound like a prediction for the future or the storyline of a new Hollywood blockbuster but it’s actually what occurred on earth in the past. In a day and age when worrying forecasts for future climate change are the norm, it seems hard to believe that such things happened regularly over time. Can humankind decipher the past and learn from it? As science gains new understanding of how the planet works, it’s becoming increasingly clear that no one place is disconnected from anywhere else. From the Alps to the Andes, seemingly unrelated parts of the world are connected in one way or another. By reading this book you’ll realize that we're facing challenges beyond anything our species has had to contend with before.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
About the author
Chris Turney
13 books23 followersProfessor Chris Turney is an Australian and British Earth scientist. He has recently completed a prestigious Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship at the University of New South Wales. He has published over 200 research papers. At 47 years, Chris has been described by The Saturday Times (UK) as ‘the new David Livingstone’.
In 2013-2014, Chris led the Australasian Antarctic Expedition which aimed to extend over a hundred years of scientific endeavour in the region and communicate the value of science and exploration of this remote and pristine environment (www.spiritofmawson.com). Chris' latest book 'Iced In' (published in North America by Kensington Press) describes the latest scientific thinking from the frozen continent and the expedition's entrapment by a major breakout of decade-old sea ice during the Christmas period. Chronicling the team's discoveries and experiences, 'Iced In' revisits famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton's harrowing Antarctic expedition almost a century before when his ship, Endurance, was trapped and ultimately lost to the ice, forcing his team to fight for survival on a vast and treacherous icescape for two years.
Chris leads a research team at the University of New South Wales and is passionate about science communication. He regularly contributes articles to the media on the discoveries and value of science and has give numerous media interviews. Taking expeditions around the world and using the latest satellite technology, Chris and his team report their discoveries under the banner of 'Intrepid Science'. In 2007, he was awarded The Sir Nicholas Shackleton Medal for outstanding young scientist for pioneering research and in 2014, the Australian Academy of Science's Frederick White Prize for the understanding of natural phenomena.
Chris is the inventor and a founding Director of Carbonscape, a New Zealand carbon refining company that offers a global solution for mitigating the effects of climate change; in 2009, it was selected as the Judges Top Choice in the Financial Times Climate Change Challenge and in 2012 came runner up in the International Dutch Postcode Lottery Green Challenge.
Chris is married and has two gorgeous children.
In 2013-2014, Chris led the Australasian Antarctic Expedition which aimed to extend over a hundred years of scientific endeavour in the region and communicate the value of science and exploration of this remote and pristine environment (www.spiritofmawson.com). Chris' latest book 'Iced In' (published in North America by Kensington Press) describes the latest scientific thinking from the frozen continent and the expedition's entrapment by a major breakout of decade-old sea ice during the Christmas period. Chronicling the team's discoveries and experiences, 'Iced In' revisits famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton's harrowing Antarctic expedition almost a century before when his ship, Endurance, was trapped and ultimately lost to the ice, forcing his team to fight for survival on a vast and treacherous icescape for two years.
Chris leads a research team at the University of New South Wales and is passionate about science communication. He regularly contributes articles to the media on the discoveries and value of science and has give numerous media interviews. Taking expeditions around the world and using the latest satellite technology, Chris and his team report their discoveries under the banner of 'Intrepid Science'. In 2007, he was awarded The Sir Nicholas Shackleton Medal for outstanding young scientist for pioneering research and in 2014, the Australian Academy of Science's Frederick White Prize for the understanding of natural phenomena.
Chris is the inventor and a founding Director of Carbonscape, a New Zealand carbon refining company that offers a global solution for mitigating the effects of climate change; in 2009, it was selected as the Judges Top Choice in the Financial Times Climate Change Challenge and in 2012 came runner up in the International Dutch Postcode Lottery Green Challenge.
Chris is married and has two gorgeous children.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 28, 2023
Ice, Mud, and Blood (2008) by Chris Turney is a book about glaciology and the science of the Ice Ages. The author is an earth scientist at the University of New South Wales. Although the book is quite old in the climate change genre, there aren't many books that focus specifically on the Ice Ages and the impact of global warming on the ice caps. The one that comes to mind is A World Without Ice (2009) by Henry N. Pollack. A glance at the book lists on Goodreads and Amazon reveals mostly academic texts with very few popular science books and only a handful of reviews. I mean, we all know the glaciers are melting, so far away from our concrete jungles, that their impact, immediate or distant, if any, is inconceivable for us. So, the oceans will rise a centimetre. Who cares? It is so far away. Such a Mainland attitude.
I shall tell you what the book is not. It fails to connect past climates of the Ice Ages with the present climate. I found it very hard to find definite points of congruence in the narrative. There is no call for climate action either. Perhaps the book wasn’t written keeping these things in mind. What does all the information about the Ice Ages mean for our future? The conclusions were hurried and left me indifferent.
But here are some bits and bobs about glaciology and climatology from the book that I found interesting:
• Some 55 million years ago, the temperature of the Earth went through the roof. This doomsday age was called the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Scientists study these drastic changes in past climate by collecting thin core samples from the ocean bed.
• They identify foraminifera or as lovingly called forams, from these cores. Forams are single-celled amoeboid protists, made of a cell body (ectoplasm) that catch food and are covered with shells of diverse forms and nature. They take up carbon, oxygen, and calcium from the oceans and make calcium carbonate shells. But forams are short-lived and die within a few weeks. They shed their shells which get deposited in ocean beds.
• Scientists measure the ratio of carbon-12 and carbon-13 in these carbonate shells and figure out changes in the climate during the time these forams decomposed.
• A type of Archaea (a separate domain of single-celled microorganisms) called Crenarchaeota produces a lipid called tetraether in their membrane which is used as a temperature monitor of past climates. Their growth is controlled by water temperature. When these microbes die, this lipid falls to the ocean floor and becomes embedded in the sediment. By measuring this lipid, scientists came up with a temperature scale called TEX86 which showed higher than usual ocean temperatures 55 million years ago.
• Glaciers or ice sheets form from the gradual squeezing of snow over time, trapping air bubbles between the gaps of snowflakes. As the old snow -called firn- reaches a depth of 80 metres, the pressure from the new snow above finally shuts the air bubbles from escaping the gaps. These trapped air bubbles are used to determine the concentration of oxygen and carbon dioxide from past climates. In Greenland, air bubbles may not be reliable carbon dioxide indicators due to carbonate dust from the deserts of Eastern Asia. Therefore, scientists drill ice cores in Antarctica to measure gas levels.
• Ancient beetle remains from lake sediments are often used to reconstruct past temperatures. Species can be identified from fragments of their fossilized exoskeleton and can accurately describe the type of environment these beetles lived in. They indicate whether the land was dry and hot or damp. And the best pointers for identifying these species seem to be male genitalia.
There is a lot of historical and current information about the cyclical Ice Ages. The Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitch spent most of the First World War doing calculations about the changes in Earth’s position relative to the Sun. I humbly reminded myself that there were no computers back then. Science was slow and glacial. He hypothesized that the collective effect of these orbital movements of Earth triggered the beginning and end of glaciation events or Ice Ages.
There is still so much unknown about how Ice Ages in the past can shape our future. Additionally, how the feedback of methane and carbon dioxide levels in the air, ocean surface warming, melting ice caps, and land erosion from glacier melting can compound in the future is hard to "predict”. And this is why I appreciated reading this book. Models and predictions derived from ancient ice cores and sediment cores can be limiting when considering the vast geological time scales. The huge number of factors makes climate change predictions difficult and tricky. How devastating the next hurricane or typhoon will be? How will the island nations cope with the uncertainties? My hope remains with more ice-core experiments.
I shall tell you what the book is not. It fails to connect past climates of the Ice Ages with the present climate. I found it very hard to find definite points of congruence in the narrative. There is no call for climate action either. Perhaps the book wasn’t written keeping these things in mind. What does all the information about the Ice Ages mean for our future? The conclusions were hurried and left me indifferent.
But here are some bits and bobs about glaciology and climatology from the book that I found interesting:
• Some 55 million years ago, the temperature of the Earth went through the roof. This doomsday age was called the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Scientists study these drastic changes in past climate by collecting thin core samples from the ocean bed.
• They identify foraminifera or as lovingly called forams, from these cores. Forams are single-celled amoeboid protists, made of a cell body (ectoplasm) that catch food and are covered with shells of diverse forms and nature. They take up carbon, oxygen, and calcium from the oceans and make calcium carbonate shells. But forams are short-lived and die within a few weeks. They shed their shells which get deposited in ocean beds.
• Scientists measure the ratio of carbon-12 and carbon-13 in these carbonate shells and figure out changes in the climate during the time these forams decomposed.
• A type of Archaea (a separate domain of single-celled microorganisms) called Crenarchaeota produces a lipid called tetraether in their membrane which is used as a temperature monitor of past climates. Their growth is controlled by water temperature. When these microbes die, this lipid falls to the ocean floor and becomes embedded in the sediment. By measuring this lipid, scientists came up with a temperature scale called TEX86 which showed higher than usual ocean temperatures 55 million years ago.
• Glaciers or ice sheets form from the gradual squeezing of snow over time, trapping air bubbles between the gaps of snowflakes. As the old snow -called firn- reaches a depth of 80 metres, the pressure from the new snow above finally shuts the air bubbles from escaping the gaps. These trapped air bubbles are used to determine the concentration of oxygen and carbon dioxide from past climates. In Greenland, air bubbles may not be reliable carbon dioxide indicators due to carbonate dust from the deserts of Eastern Asia. Therefore, scientists drill ice cores in Antarctica to measure gas levels.
• Ancient beetle remains from lake sediments are often used to reconstruct past temperatures. Species can be identified from fragments of their fossilized exoskeleton and can accurately describe the type of environment these beetles lived in. They indicate whether the land was dry and hot or damp. And the best pointers for identifying these species seem to be male genitalia.
There is a lot of historical and current information about the cyclical Ice Ages. The Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitch spent most of the First World War doing calculations about the changes in Earth’s position relative to the Sun. I humbly reminded myself that there were no computers back then. Science was slow and glacial. He hypothesized that the collective effect of these orbital movements of Earth triggered the beginning and end of glaciation events or Ice Ages.
There is still so much unknown about how Ice Ages in the past can shape our future. Additionally, how the feedback of methane and carbon dioxide levels in the air, ocean surface warming, melting ice caps, and land erosion from glacier melting can compound in the future is hard to "predict”. And this is why I appreciated reading this book. Models and predictions derived from ancient ice cores and sediment cores can be limiting when considering the vast geological time scales. The huge number of factors makes climate change predictions difficult and tricky. How devastating the next hurricane or typhoon will be? How will the island nations cope with the uncertainties? My hope remains with more ice-core experiments.
September 26, 2012
Fairly engaging summary of past climate changes. Pretty easy to understand, but sometimes I got a bit confused about event timing - narrative went back and forth between geological time periods using years sometimes ("55 mya) and other times period names (the Eemain). I really would have appreciated a nice timeline.
August 5, 2011
Fact-loaded but still a page-turner, this book sets forth a thorough and compelling case for global warming being man-made and, just possibly, something that might be arrested in time to save mankind.
October 6, 2018
Scientist-turned-writer Chris Turney does a fantastic job of condensing some of the key aspects and important concepts of the field of paleoclimatology in this book. By no means, is it an easy task, but Turney quite effectively weaves together a coherent narrative that presses upon time periods as vastly different as "snowball Earth" and the Eemian interglacial. I wish I had read this book before getting into the field of paleoclimate myself. This book is dense and filled with facts, but it doesn't ostracize a newcomer or non-technical person to the field. One detraction was the lack of a timeline and the heavy-handed back and forth "jargon" usage of the geological timescale can tend to be a bit confusing. All in all, this book does a great job of summarizing the state of the art of paleoclimate in the mid-2000s and stresses upon the brilliant, puzzle-solving nature of the field as well as its critical importance to anticipating future climate change and its impacts.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews