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The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future

Jon Gertner (Goodreads Author)

4.18 · Rating details · 671 ratings · 139 reviews

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 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 The Ice at the End of the World, 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. ...more

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Hardcover, 418 pages

Published June 11th 2019 by Random House

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Nov 14, 2019 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 5000-2019

3.5 Impeccably presented and in an interesting manner, the author begins with a lost colony on Greenland, and the early explorers who wanted to cross the frozen middle of Greenland. Hazardous, so many deaths, attempts, but eventually much was discovered. Scientific exploration was accomplished at this time as well. Even early on it was determined that if Greenland's ice melted, the sea levels would rise by 25 ft. Amazingly given the primitive tools of the time, it would later be determined he wa ...more

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Aug 02, 2020 Max rated it really liked it

Shelves: science

This book has three themes, all centered on Greenland’s ice sheet 1,500 miles long, nearly 700 miles wide and up to 10,000 feet deep holding three quadrillion tons of ice. Gertner begins with adventure describing explorations of Greenland’s ice covered interior from the 1880’s through the 1930s. In this part Gertner gives us the personal stories of the explorers, the risks they took and the hardships they endured. The second section of the book skips to the late forties following WWII. Explorati This book has three themes, all centered on Greenland’s ice sheet 1,500 miles long, nearly 700 miles wide and up to 10,000 feet deep holding three quadrillion tons of ice. Gertner begins with adventure describing explorations of Greenland’s ice covered interior from the 1880’s through the 1930s. In this part Gertner gives us the personal stories of the explorers, the risks they took and the hardships they endured. The second section of the book skips to the late forties following WWII. Exploration continues but the adventure is largely gone as vehicles and planes take over from men with iron wills, dog sleds and horses. Gertner still profiles the people but mostly in terms of their contributions to science. The story becomes one of scientific discovery. This leads to the third story, climate change, the future of Greenland’s ice sheet and glaciers, and what that holds for the world. My notes follow.

Gertner begins his history of explorations of Greenland’s interior with the expedition of Fridtjof Nansen in 1888. At the time no one had crossed Greenland’s interior. The west coast of Greenland was accessible with Danish Settlements and native Inuit ones. The east coast was inaccessible. It was enclosed in miles of pack ice drifting on the seas offshore. Nansen would cross east to west. It was simpler to start in the west but there was no exit once you got to the east coast. Nansen had a ship offload him and his men on the pack ice. They took two boats to navigate the ice. They nearly drifted out to sea trapped by the ice. It took them eleven days just to make it to shore. Then they had to climb the high cliffs of ice and avoid the many crevasses which could mean instant death. Once on the ice sheet they could use snowshoes and skis. They pulled their sleds themselves so they wouldn’t have to carry food for dogs. Their trip across the narrower south end was 350 miles. It took them about ten weeks from the time they left their ship to reach a settlement on the west coast. The interior of Greenland was bleak, barren and COLD. Their success required meticulous planning and the determination to persevere against the bitter elements. A fall or injury could be catastrophic. They became the first men to cross the interior of Greenland. Nansen would return to Denmark to widespread acclaim.

The next expedition was by an American Robert Peary in 1892. He had hoped to be first to cross Greenland. Now he felt he had to do more than Nansen. He decided to travel on the ice sheet near the north coast of Greenland going from the west coast to the east coast and then returning, 600 miles each way. Perry spent the winter on the west coast so he could get an early start at the end of April. His team would use sled dogs. He counted on excursions down the ice sheet to the north coast to hunt for muskox and seals to replenish his food. The north coast was uncharted territory. He was taking a big chance, but it worked. Peary would make the first maps of the north coast. They reached their destination on the northwest most part of the coast on July 4. He planted a U. S. flag on top of a cliff overlooking a glacier. Hungry and with very little little food to spare they returned in early August. Peary too achieved notoriety and hit the lecture tours back in the U. S.

A more serious effort to document Greenland was made by Knud Rasmussen. He grew up in Greenland and was 1/8th Inuit. He moved with his family to Denmark when he was twelve. Inspired by Nansen and Peary he vowed to return. But he did more than just demonstrate his prowess at conquering the icy interior. He documented the geology, the ecology and the culture of the Inuit. In 1902-3 he traveled along Greenland’s west and north coasts going from Inuit village to village ending with the Polar Inuit, the northern most tribe in the world. His books about the Inuit, their beliefs and practices, published in 1904, made him a national celebrity in Denmark. He would spend the next several decades recording tens of thousands of pages of notes of his interviews and impressions of the Inuit. He established a permanent trading station on the northeast coast at a settlement his partner named Thule (Too-lee) station. In April 1912 Rasmussen and his team begin an expedition of undetermined length traveling on the ice sheet near the north coast of Greenland where they could hunt and then to look for evidence of a long missing explorer. They mapped new areas of the coast and revisited Peary’s cliff. They never found traces of the explorer. In September they just made it back before running out of food. In 1917 Rasmussen led a second expedition along the north coast taking along a geologist and botanist. Sadly they had insufficient food, the dogs were eaten, the botanist died of starvation and one other man got disappeared and died. These trips were exceedingly dangerous and run with razor thin margins for error.

In 1913 the German Alfred Wegner led an expedition of four men 700 miles from the northern east coast to the central west coast. They spent the winter near their starting point to get going as early as possible in the spring. Rather than dogs they used Icelandic horses to pull the sleds, all of which died on the way. Suffering numerous near calamities and injuries, the men arrived on the west coast barely alive. Wegner would return to Greenland in 1930 to set up a weather monitoring and research station in the center of the ice sheet, some 250 miles from the west coast. Three men stayed the winter at the station, one because he was too injured to return. They lived in quarters they dug out below the ice. Turns out, living in the ice was much more comfortable than living in tents on the surface. The real problem was getting enough supplies to last until spring. Wegner led a resupply mission in the fall which ran into constant delays but made it delivering the needed supplies. The weather turned brutal. He and his companion did not make it back. Wegner’s body was found the next spring. His partner’s never was. No one knows exactly what happened to them. The station was resupplied in the spring and the men were determined to conduct the experiments Wegner planned. They dug a 50 foot shaft down in the ice measuring density at different depths. They set off explosives to determine the depth of the ice sheet from waves reflected from bedrock.

The age of machines entered the exploration of Greenland in 1949 when Frenchman Paul-Emile Viktor used weasels, WWII army vehicles designed for harsh cold weather conditions, to carry his party to the center of the ice sheet near where Wegner had set up his station. They were able to erect comfortable quarters with electricity. They could be resupplied by air. Teams of eight men spent two winters there and continued the weather and ice sheet measurements of Wegner’s team. Digging down into the snow, the scientists could determine the annual snowfall and even past temperatures as Wegner’s team had also done establishing a baseline for future measurements. They even bored through the ice to take the first core, but the quality was poor and the analytical techniques available were limited.

Everything changed when, in the fears of the cold war, The U. S. began building a huge airbase in 1951 at Thule, near Rasmussen’s old trading post. A decades old discussion with Rasmussen led one of the planners to suggest the site. The Inuit settlement there was moved north as the base drove away wildlife and was destroying the indigenous culture. The establishment of the base enabled exploration on a greatly expanded level and the U. S. government would fund much of the research. The military needed to understand the stability and future of the ice sheet and glaciers. This gave a big impetus to the development of modern glaciology. Henri Bader was a Swiss citizen and chief scientist of SPIRE which had been set up by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to study snow, ice and permafrost. The military gave him a big budget which he put to good use. While personally he was interested in the structure of snowflakes and how their composition affected glaciers and the ice sheet, he built a team for other work. He hired Carl Benson who would transform the local studies by Wegner and Viktor into studies across the ice sheet determining annual snow fall levels and temperatures throughout much of Greenland. These measurements taken 1953-55 would be valuable sixty years later to show where the ice was receding and where it was stable.

In 1959 the U. S. began building Camp Century in Greenland’s interior. It was built under the ice. The purpose was declared to be that of improving building and survival practices in the Arctic. Another purpose was stated to be scientific exploration, which was a cover for the real purpose, to find out whether missiles could be successfully placed under the ice sheet. But the money for exploration was well used. More ice cores were drilled. Drilling techniques improved as did analysis. As opposed to sea bed cores, ice cores contained air bubbles which could reveal past climate. In the 1960s they were drilling to bedrock uncovering thousands of years of atmosphere. The U. S. lost interest in Camp Century and future exploration funding had to come from traditional sources which limited operations. Still in 1981 a 6600 foot ice core in excellent condition was drilled which now could be inspected with mass spectrometers for oxygen and hydrogen isotopes that would reveal the climate over 100,000 years ago.

In 1992-93 two teams at the summit of the ice sheet in Greenland drilled ice cores 10,000 feet down before they hit bedrock. The sites were strategically placed 30 kilometers apart to not interfere with each other but to allow comparison to confirm their findings. The 1981 ice core had noticed rapid changes in temperatures 11-12,000 years ago. Was this an anomaly? The two new ice cores matched each other perfectly and confirmed abrupt climate change. 11,700 years ago average temperatures rose about 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few years. The earth’s atmosphere quickly transitioned from the last ice age. The reason isn’t known, but the most prevalent theory is that ocean currents changed involving positive feedback loops. Some think atmospheric circulation changed. It may have been both.

In the 1990s new technology came to the fore. NASA began using aircraft with laser altimeters which combined with GPS allowed accurate mapping of the elevation of the Greenland ice sheet. In 1999 a report based on six years of data showed that parts of the ice sheet were quickly thinning. In 2003 NASA launched a satellite, ICESat, which performed the same measurements over Greenland and Antarctica constantly. Another satellite, GRACE, measured minute changes in the Earth’s gravity. Gravity is not even over the earth’s surface. The loss of ice over Greenland would reduce the gravity measured there. A report of GRACE’s findings in 2009 showed that Greenland’s annual ice loss was 286 billion tons. In 2012 a satellite showed that melt water was all over the ice sheet, its entire surface was melting. The arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet.

ICESat failed and was retired in 2010. GRACE continued but couldn’t give the fine detail provided by ICESat. So laser altimeter surveying again was done by airplane. Glaciers became the focus of understanding how and where the ice was lost. Glaciers regularly calve icebergs and drain meltwater to the sea. Glaciologists soon realized that many glaciers were unstable and that if some collapsed they alone would raise ocean levels significantly: Jacobshavn in Greenland by a foot and Thwaites in Antarctica by two feet. Worse they are supporting structures for the ice sheets. Thwaites holds back the West Antarctic ice sheet which contains enough ice to raise ocean levels twelve feet.

In the 2010s both atmospheric and sea temperatures were rising. Arctic sea ice was rapidly receding allowing the darker water to absorb more heat creating a positive feedback loop. Half the ice loss in Greenland is through the glaciers, the other half is on the surface of the ice sheet. Some of this water is stored in the underlying layers of the ice sheet creating an aquifer the size of West Virginia. One day this water could gush into the ocean. As the ice recedes and more human and biological activity takes place around the ice sheet, more dust, soot and other particles land on it, darkening it and melting it faster. Climate scientists also worry about the release of methane, a strong greenhouse gas, from permafrost which would create another positive feedback loop.

The major question scientists are asking is will the rise in temperatures lead to abrupt changes and if so when. It could take many decades or centuries for large glaciers and ice sheets to collapse or it could happen sooner and abruptly. The scientists don’t know. The current Arctic warmth is enough to eventually melt the Greenland ice sheet which would raise sea levels over twenty feet. Unless the world lowers carbon emissions significantly the loss of the ice sheet is inevitable. So even if this and the next generation don’t have to deal with it, later ones will. The current consensus of climatologists calls for a one meter (3.2 feet) rise in seas level by 2100. But it doesn’t stop there, larger sea level rises following are already “committed” meaning inevitable based on current conditions. The current commitment is 2.3 meters (7.5 feet). If temperatures continue to rise this century as they have, then a twenty foot sea level rise would be committed. Even the one meter rise would mean some low lying nations would be destroyed, beaches and shorelines eroded, increased flooding, infrastructure and property damaged, and aquifers contaminated with salt water. Along the U. S. coast 5 million people and 2.6 million homes are on property less than four feet above high tide. Rich coastal nations like the U. S. would pay a heavy price; poor coastal nations would be devastated. ...more

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Feb 06, 2020 Jerrie (redwritinghood) rated it really liked it

This was a fascinating book. Part 1 was a look at the early exploration of Greenland by European and American adventurers. Part 2 was a more scientific look at what the ice of Greenland has revealed about the history of the global climate, the changes seen in the past, and what it has revealed about our potential future. Engagingly written, but I would have liked a bit more on the climate change issue.

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Jun 30, 2019 Vicky Hunt rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: to-the-mountains-canyons-poles, technology-science-business

A Microcosm of Glaciology: And The Politics That Pay

The book that needed to be written; The Ice at the End of the World is that book that briefly surveys the history of Greenland’s exploration, and the work that is done in those research stations we know exist, but know little about. I have read a large number of books written by and about polar explorers and expeditions. But, I have not yet found good books on what is happening in those research stations and in the field of glaciology. In the f ...more

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May 21, 2020 Robert Sheard rated it really liked it

I found this fascinating. It's part explorer history, part scientific laboratory. It's really a history about how we know what we know (and don't know) about Greenland and the Arctic.

Of course, in the end, it's frightening because we've known for decades what was happening with climate change and humanity refuses to act morally or selflessly to mitigate the impending changes that the loss of the Greenland ice sheets and mega-glaciers in Antarctica will bring about. It's the same selfish impulses ...more

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Nov 07, 2019 Carly Friedman rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2019-nonfiction-goal, audiobooks, nfbc-brs-and-botms, because-science

This is a fascinating book that covers the long history of the exploration of and research on Greenland's ice. It starts with early explorations of the area. What crazy adventures! I cannot imagine anything worse that trekking across all that ice. This section definitely reminds me of Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage.

Then the book turns to early research on glacial layers and historical temperature changes. Like the early expeditions into the area, the scientists were really charting u ...more

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Jun 24, 2019 Susan Paxton rated it really liked it

Shelves: current-affairs, weather-climate

This is an important book. Deniers argue that climate change is a recent and invented or, conversely, a "natural" phenomenon. Jon Gertner spent several years working on this book to prove that the current climate change is none of those things, but in fact has been evident for many decades and is human-caused. The arena he selected for his tale is Greenland, the world's largest island, covered in a sheet of ice that is in places several thousands of feet thick, and his method is looking closely ...more

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Nov 30, 2019 Irene rated it really liked it

This is a survey of the scientific exploration and research of Greenland’s glaciers over the past century and a half. Through courageous explorers and dedicated scientists, this research has helped humans understand how polar ice impacts global meteorology and geology. As the survey moves to the present, this research is revealing alarming facts about climate change and devastating predictions about the melting of these vast fields of ice in the near future.

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Oct 11, 2019 Stephen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, adventure, history, climate-and-weather

In a line: One part history of the early efforts to explore Greenland's vast ice sheets, one part history of how paleoclimatology was born.

My reading journeys have taken me to Greenland recently, but instead of reading more about the Viking settlements there, I wanted to read about another tribe: the explorers and scientists who willingly endured months of supremely hostile terrain for both glory and science. The Ice at the End of the World is one half history of Greenland’s early exploration, In a line: One part history of the early efforts to explore Greenland's vast ice sheets, one part history of how paleoclimatology was born.

My reading journeys have taken me to Greenland recently, but instead of reading more about the Viking settlements there, I wanted to read about another tribe: the explorers and scientists who willingly endured months of supremely hostile terrain for both glory and science. The Ice at the End of the World is one half history of Greenland’s early exploration, one half chronicle of its role as a site for constant scientific investigation. The latter is particularly important given the poles’ roles in regulating our global climate – and their testimony, buried in ice, as to how much has changed and how quickly.

At first, they came only to see if it was possible for a man to cross the ice. Human settlement in Greenland, even among the Inuit who are well accustomed to its severities, is limited to the coastal fringes. When explorers like Peary and Wegener landed in Greenland and began preparing for their expeditions – learning as much as they could from the Intuit, who had centuries of accumulated knowledge for how to move and survive in daunting near-polar conditions – their native hosts could only think them lunatics for wanting to trespass into the wastes haunted only by gods and death. The early expeditions first accomplished simply getting across the great ice in the midst of Greenland without perishing; later ones would push north in an effort to determine the land’s boundaries. Did the ice go ever north, linking with the north pole? Or were there limits?

Although scientific research was conducted in these early jaunts – explosives were used to set off seismographs and monitor how long it took the sound waves to radiate down to bedrock before rebounding to the surface again -- intense efforts to map the thickness of the ice sped up after World War 2, in part because of advance of air traffic infrastructure into Greenland during the war, and in part because of the United States’ sudden strategic interest in the area. Greenland may have been useful during the war for protecting shipping traffic, but in the next war, against the Soviet Union – it would be vital. The north may very well be the front lines, and bases couldn’t be built without really understanding the science of the ice sheets -- how they moved, settled, grew. So began Project Century, which combined science and military aspirations: the United States’ fondest hope was to base nuclear weapons in Greenland in case the Cold War became an active conflict. This project would result in extensive ice core samples being taken and analyzed.

Ice at the End of the World begins with journeys of physical exploration, of men trekking the interior of hitherto-unseen ice sheets….but page by page, it transitions slowly into a journey of mental exploration, of men and then women searching for answers, and finding them. They realize that Greenland’s ice cores carried the history of past temperatures with them, because different isotypes of oxygen appear at differing frequencies at greater or lower temperatures. That ice told a story – one that challenged the idea that climatic shifts were bound to be slow and gradual. They could be, in fact, fast and disastrous – and that was true not only of the past, but of the future. Could global civilization survive a shock imposed by some of the radical climate shifts they’d seen in the ice?

We’re still working on the answer to that one. In an age of growing awareness regarding our role in atmospheric instability, some people believe we’re doomed, that Earth will become unlivable. Others simply believe we’ll watch cities like Miami became new Atlantises (Atlantii?), but otherwise adapt.

What is known is that The Ice at the End of the World is a terrific read, combining the best parts of an adventure novel – the exploration of the unknown, the endurance of hard ship, the celebration of ingenious adaptations to severity -- with a history of a paleoclimatology, and the dawning of one of our age’s most talked-about scientific issues.
...more

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Feb 20, 2019 Tomislav rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 5-stars, science, net-galley, history

I read an advance reader copy of Jon Gertner’s The Ice at the End of the World, in uncorrected proof ebook, provided to me by Penguin / Random House through netgalley, in return for promising to write an honest review. The book is scheduled for release on June 11, 2019. Jon Gertner is an American writer, the author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (2012), which I have not yet read, and a longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine.

The book first fol I read an advance reader copy of Jon Gertner’s The Ice at the End of the World, in uncorrected proof ebook, provided to me by Penguin / Random House through netgalley, in return for promising to write an honest review. The book is scheduled for release on June 11, 2019. Jon Gertner is an American writer, the author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (2012), which I have not yet read, and a longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine.

The book first follows a historical approach to the exploration of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and then transitions into a historical presentation of the subsequent scientific investigations, right up to 2018.

Greenland is the largest island in the world, located in the Arctic Ocean between North America and Europe, and barely inhabited. It is largely covered with a mile-thick continental glacier – much like that which retreated from northern North America and Europe a mere 10,000 years ago – and like the one which still covers Antarctica. Gertner covers the first expeditions to cross that Ice Sheet episodically, beginning with Fridtjof Nansen’s 1888 expedition of five men pulling five heavy sledges. The stories introduce the characters, describe the techniques and technologies used, include interactions with the sparse indigenous cultures, and dramatically trace the events of those critical crossings. An interesting historical photograph introduces each story, and they reminded me of memoirs of the early Antarctic expeditions I have previously read. Indeed, a few of the individuals are the same. Up until the interregnum of World War II, the interests of these early explorers such as Robert Peary, Knud Rasmussen, Peter Freuchen, and Alfred Wegener were personal fame and national prestige. Some data was collected, but primarily of a cartographic nature.

A new era of exploration began in Greenland at the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s. Because Greenland is strategically located between the nuclear superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, the US spent enormous amounts of money and manpower developing the military utility of the region, even offered to purchase it in its entirety from Denmark. Military technology and logistics required large amounts of accurate data, and natural science researchers were able to quietly piggyback. However, with the development of intercontinental missiles based in the homelands, the high-spending period passed, leaving infrastructure in place for more purely scientific endeavors. With time it has become apparent that the ice sheet is not in a steady state, and not even just receding at a geological pace. GPS-indexed air and satellite observations have detailed how the retreat is accelerating. Deep core samples of the ice have shown that periods of relatively rapid climatic change do occur. The system is complex with positively reinforced cycles that could continue to drive ice sheet collapse once initiated. Coming up to the present day, Gertner focuses on research into the mechanisms of those sudden changes, which could potentially push sea level rise in unexpected large steps over the current 3 mm per year.

The Ice at the End of the World is both an entertaining history, and a clear explanation of the current state of knowledge of glaciology and its relationship to oceans and climate. This book is timely, and I am highly recommending it. ...more

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Aug 08, 2020 Karyl rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020, non-fiction, science, favorites, history, kindle-reads, library-reads, arctic-antarctic

This is a fan-freaking-tastic, though somewhat depressing, book. I’ve long been fascinated by the coldest regions of our planet, and of the intrepid explorers who have mapped them, and the hardy native groups who have made these areas their home for generations. I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting into with this book, but it quickly drew me in and held me captive for 300 pages.

Gertner begins his book with a look at modern scientific research being done on this huge island covered by ice, but ...more

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Nov 20, 2019 Phil Boyd rated it really liked it

100 years of exploring the ice covering the top of the world. Gives a great look at how glaciology has advanced thanks to the studies done in Greenladn (in part because of the Cold War). Also provides some context for people trying to understand how melting ice sheets are going to create sea level rise and just how much of a problem it is.

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Mar 31, 2020 Jacqueline Worboys rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2020

Greenland’s remote, mysterious island, with its tiny population, has always attracted the lure of travel by those who wonder and wander. Gertner writes a clear and enticing history of how, in the past one hundred and fifty years, scientists and explorers have sought to learn more about this gateway to the North Pole. The reader cannot help but marvel at the determination or foolhardiness that drove men to walk across the treacherous landscape in life-threatening weather. In the second part of th ...more

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Jul 14, 2020 Ben rated it liked it

Shelves: science, history, nature

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 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." ...more

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Jun 29, 2019 Donna DRB rated it it was amazing

I highly recommend this fascinating and important book, beautifully written by New York Times bestselling author and long-time friend Jon Gertner. After finishing it, I had a real understanding of not only Greenland's past (including jaw-dropping accounts of exploration) but also Greenland's current and future impact on our world. A must-read book! ...more

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Apr 03, 2020 Kazen rated it liked it

I'm glad I learned about Greenland but man, I had to prop my eyelids open for long stretches. I appreciate how Gertner frames the explorer stories, keeping the native peoples at front of mind, but a 300+ page newspaper article isn't quite my thing.

Full thoughts in my Booktube Prize vlog: https://youtu.be/Fh0DoDPw_kw ...more

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Sep 08, 2019 Marge rated it really liked it

Most of this book details the history of early explorers on Greenland which was certainly interesting and also distressing. Reading about death, near death, having to eat their horses and dogs that pulled their sleds for food and continual struggle to survive was almost unbearable for me, but does show our strong desire to explore our world and challenge ourselves. Also this provides a sharp contrast to how much the climate and conditions have changed over 200 years.

The information from centurie ...more

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Jul 12, 2019 Kaitlyn Joy rated it it was ok

Shelves: netgalley, 2019-books

I received an Advanced Review Copy of The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner from the publisher Random House through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

What It’s About: A history of glacierology, with scientific fact interluded in.

I'll be honest, I really didn't love this. I'm a scientist but know nothing about Glaciers and Greenland and so was excited to see the implications of global warming but I really fou ...more

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Aug 15, 2019 Charles Fried rated it it was amazing

If you want an excellent introduction to climate change this is the book. There are great stories of the early explorers of Greenland, as well as recent scientific expeditions. This book is suitable for both scientists and non-scientists, full of anecdotes, and people, and stories, as well as scientific material clearly and simply explained. This is a frightening book. It scares me that we have climate change deniers, dangerous idiots, running our country. They should be required to read this bo ...more

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Nov 24, 2019 Daria rated it it was amazing

I found this book fascinating! There was so much information about Greenland, none of which I knew, and I found myself getting deeper into caring about this earth and its future. Never thought I’d get so interested but I did and I think it’s because the writing was so good. Beautiful descriptions of scenery, life on this island and of those who came to explore it. If you aren’t that knowledgeable about the ice sheet, you will be after you finish this book and you will want to read all you can ab ...more

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Feb 07, 2020 Andy Kindle rated it it was amazing

The most impactful part of this book was that in the stories it told about the history of Greenland exploratory by adventurers and scientists, it told the story of the ice sheet's changing climate. There was a clear progression throughout the stories, without the author pointing it out, of a steadily warming climate as explorations spanned decades. Most poignant was the first science settlement dug into the glacier and the increasing pressure of accumulating snow and ice collapsing roofs to curr ...more

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Mar 10, 2021 Numidica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the exploration of Greenland, and how it became the laboratory in which scientists learned to read ice cores to understand the climates of the past. The early explorers of Greenland like Wegener and Rasmussen were adventurers as much as scientists. I was happy to run into Alfred Wegener again, because my mother told me about him and his plate tectonics theory when I was about ten years old, and I did a sixth grade science repo This book will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the exploration of Greenland, and how it became the laboratory in which scientists learned to read ice cores to understand the climates of the past. The early explorers of Greenland like Wegener and Rasmussen were adventurers as much as scientists. I was happy to run into Alfred Wegener again, because my mother told me about him and his plate tectonics theory when I was about ten years old, and I did a sixth grade science report on Wegener and his theory. The pre-WW2 scientists were as much adventurers as scientists, and Wegener died on the ice sheet after resupplying the outpost he had established. He started the fatal trip because he knew he couldn't over-winter at the outpost; they lacked sufficient rations, so he turned back (in November) heading for the west coast and died, of course, because unprotected November on the Greenland ice sheet is not consonant with life. Knud Rasmussen was an anthropologist as well as an explorer, and he documented much of Inuit culture in Greenland before the influence of Western peoples became dominant there.

WW2 brought the Americans to Greenland (and they have never left), and after WW2, the French came to Greenland under the leadership of the incredibly resourceful and interesting Paul-Emile Victor, who organized the first motorized scientific expedition to the middle of the ice sheet. A host of other scientists began to descend upon the ice, with the American Army largely funding their efforts right through the 1960's as Greenland became a somewhat bizarre pawn in Cold War military strategy. The Army Corps of Engineers had a plan to build tunnels in the ice in which ICBMs would be shuttled around, invisible to Russian satellites. The idea should never have passed the smell test, but an enterprising and persuasive Swiss scientist named Bader, who was attached to the project, convinced the US Military that massive research on the Greenland ice was necessary to enable the ICBM tunnels, so Bader was given funding to start drilling ice cores at greater and greater depths, thus beginning the collection of ice cores and the associated climatological history that has been teased from air bubbles and particles trapped in the ice.

The story the ice tells is that climate has changed amazingly quickly in the past, and so it is reasonable to believe it can do so again. The scientists working on the ice now are in a race with warming as Greenland's ice melts and pours into the north Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The interesting and alarming thing is what the scientists say among themselves, which is that the IPCC's predictions of sea level rise by 2100 are too conservative by at least half. One said, in effect, if the IPCC says sea level will rise by one meter by 2100, you can be sure the real number is at least two meters, and probably more. And Greenland is not even the biggest problem in sea level rise; that would be the West Antarctic Ice Sheets. The author does not delve deep into the science of warming, but he makes clear how the ice cores illustrate that past warmings have often been extremely rapid, and he references scientific discussion of some of the same technology Elizabeth Kolbert explores in Under a White Sky: injection of reflective particles into the stratosphere to shade the earth to slow warming, along with devices to scrub CO2 from the air. The fact that such ideas are discussed seriously among sober scientists, inclined to conservative estimates and approaches, is a hint at how bad things really are.

The book was perhaps a bit more than I really wanted to know about Greenland, and I wish the science had been more center stage, but I enjoyed it and the stories of the explorers and scientists of the ice. ...more

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Dec 04, 2019 Claudia rated it liked it

Shelves: z2019-nf-challenge, y2019, history-environment, giveaways

Sometimes you simply have to wonder about these men and women who are determined to explore the far reaches of whatever part of the world that catches their fancy - be it the unexplored depths of the sea, the wilds of Africa or the Amazon or the bitter cold of Antarctica and Greenland.

This follows the expeditions of several of the major explorers of Greenland from Fridtjof Nansen's trip across the southern tip of Greenland in 1888 through Peary's northern explorations in 1892 along with Rasmusse Sometimes you simply have to wonder about these men and women who are determined to explore the far reaches of whatever part of the world that catches their fancy - be it the unexplored depths of the sea, the wilds of Africa or the Amazon or the bitter cold of Antarctica and Greenland.

This follows the expeditions of several of the major explorers of Greenland from Fridtjof Nansen's trip across the southern tip of Greenland in 1888 through Peary's northern explorations in 1892 along with Rasmussen and Freuchen in 1912 and Wegener in 1913 and 1930. These were the hardiest of explorers (or the foolish) since the ice and storms ruled the island.

Then came the age of mechanical aids and the second World War. The U.S. government built several outposts, weather stations and airstrips in order to defend Greenland from German excursion and usage as a base far too close to North America. Further expansion occurred as the Cold War with the Soviets heated up while at the same time glaciologists were digging through the massive amounts of ice to find bedrock as well as interpret weather changes over the centuries.

Even now, the ice-pack at the center of the island as well as some major calving fronts of several glaciers are being carefully watched - not only in Greenland but in Antarctica. Originally thought to be stable - the amount of new snow countering the summer melts - it has been confirmed extensively that the ice is retreating and the glaciers are calving icebergs at a prestigious rate. Scientists are carefully monitoring the snow and ice packs not only the depths of the island but along the edges. Companies are beginning to flock to those borderlands as access to rare earths and other minerals and elements are becoming easier.

So this is a twosome for the reader - a rather comprehensive review of the history of the exploration of Greenland as well as the origins of the science of glaciology even as it is revealing the effects of climatic changes.

oh, and President Trump's attempt to buy Greenland from the Danish government. They tried om December 1946 and the Danish officials showed the same lack of interest in negotiating and selling.

This was received through a GoodReads giveaway.

2019-173 ...more

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Jan 20, 2020 Jean Bonilla rated it really liked it

What a vital warning of the state of our world. Gertner writes well, without a brinksmanship tone, but putting the accelerating pace of the melting ice caps in the context of history and geological time. He does it all in a wonderful evocative style that captures the frozen wasteland of Greenland.

Maybe we have two hundred years; maybe we have two decades. While we don’t know the answer to that question, we do know that it’s happening. If you believe climate change is a natural phenomenon, we ha ...more

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Jun 18, 2020 Katie rated it liked it

Shelves: 2020-personal-aty, nonfiction-read, elements-nonfiction

This book was a history of Greenlandic exploration, initially for the sake of exploration, and then for the sake of science. As we followed the history closer to the present, we got more of the science, what it tells us about what is happening to Greenland's ice sheet (hint: it's melting), and what the impact of global warning and ice melt will do for the future of this planet and the world as we know it.

The line that struck me most in this book was about how rarely in the history of the world ...more

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Jun 24, 2020 Colleen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

This is a truly fascinating and gripping account of the exploration of Greenland by first explorers and then scientists, and how each built up the groundwork for the next. Gertner builds up the case brick by brick to the unassailable conclusion that global warming presents, as a NYT reviewer wrote, "an existential threat" to our planet. Other Goodreaders have well described the book already. I would note that Gertner does an excellent job of explaining some complex material clearly but without c ...more

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Jul 25, 2020 Leo Walsh rated it liked it

An in-depth read about the exploration of the Arctic regions of Greenland. I was expecting a little more science, but instead, this is more historical, focusing on the personality of the "rugged explorers" who braved death to reach the North Pole in pre-modern times. But with this emphasis on Jack London-style adventurers and harrowing treks, the science gets lost in the shuffle until the end, where Global Warming is addressed.

I'm going 3-stars. Mostly because I was expecting science, how the b ...more

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Nov 22, 2019 Tiffany rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, scandinavian-nordic

This book is almost two books in one. We cover the early days of Greenland exploring, where there death defying treks using skis, dogsleds, and Icelandic horses, involved some scientific observation but mostly just old-school "because it was there" exploration. It's fun to read about although you'll definitely have your feelings about the explorers, some of whom were total jerks to the native Inuit population. Then we morph into Greenland exploration that is less death defying (in the age of rad ...more

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Dec 16, 2019 Lin rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2019-nonfiction-books, science, audiobooks

I enjoyed this book and the way it furthered my knowledge about the history of exploration and scientific experimentation in Greenland, as well as the current studies into climate change. The first part of the book, especially the Alfred Wegener parts, was my favorite, and the end was very good too. The middle part of the book, about the drilling through the ice sheet, was pretty slow. Overall, though, an excellent book.

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Feb 25, 2020 Katie Suttles rated it really liked it

This book was a good overview of the first explorers and their reasons for exploring which were generally both scientific and personal. We've come a long way very quickly in the ease of exploring. I hope that books like this can really help get the urgent message out about climate change and the devestating effects it can have. ...more

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About Jon Gertner

Jon Gertner

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I’m a book author and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and I tend to describe myself as both a journalist and historian. In addition to the Sunday Magazine, my writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Wired, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Technology Review and Fast Company. Usually I write about science, nature, ...more

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“Nine out of every ten people the first time they meet me ask, “How did you stand the cold?” As a matter of fact, the cold of the Arctic regions to a well man, properly fed and properly clothed, is no more serious than is the cold of our own winters to us here. But the darkness, the months-long winter night! That is different.” — 1 likes

“What are you working on? Why are you working on it? What do you expect to get out of it?44” — 0 likes

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