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

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars | 251 ratings

Price: 17.72

Last update: 05-16-2024


About this item

A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change.

“Jon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited. The result is a gripping and important book.” (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction)

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post Christian Science Monitor Library Journal

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 20th 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.


Top reviews from the United States

Dwayne
5.0 out of 5 stars Awe inspiring.
Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2019
50 years ago the first results from the analysis of Greenland ice cores were published in SCIENCE, and it validated what the first explorer to cross Greenland had predicted, that Greenland would be the Rosetta stone for interpreting the Earth's climate. Inside this core (the first ice core ever analyzed) were annual layers of ice containing ambient air bubbles and an unbroken record of temperatures dating back 100,000 years.The most astonishing discovery from this data set was that 11,700 years ago temperatures around Greenland rose 18 F in less than one human lifetime (and never went back down). Before this revelation, everyone thought it would take thousands of years for Earth's temperature to change that much. Now, thanks to glaciology, the study of ice, we know that nonlinear responses, positive feedbacks, and tipping points are built into the laws of nature. Satellite measurements show Greenland is currently losing around 280 billion tons of ice a year and the melt rate is increasing. We are entering another period of rapid climate change, except this time human-induced CO2 emissions are the agent of change, not geological forces like Milankovitch cycles. 98% of climatologists believe this, the other 2% are mercenaries funded by the fossil fuel industry. (My observation, not the author's).

This is a fun book, full of interesting characters. The first half is the history of Greenland and the era of the heroic explorers, the second half the story of recent, ongoing scientific research there. I've read the author's other book about the history of Bell Labs, he is a great writer, very enjoyable. To learn more about about climate change I also recommend "A Farewell to Ice" by Cambridge professor Peter Wadhams, which covers Arctic climatology research but with more scientific depth. It's awe inspiring the hardships these ice scientists endure to increase our understanding for a largely ignorant, apathetic, and unappreciative public.
Matthew Rapaport
4.0 out of 5 stars Good historical review of early exploration and modern investigation of Greenland
Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2021
A book mostly about Greenland, its exploration, and its present climatological status. Gertner takes us from the first European ships tentatively exploring its shores in the mid 18th Century (many trapped for weeks or months by ice, some destroyed), the first efforts to cross the central ice sheet in the mid 19th Century, the transformation wrought by the U.S. military in the early-to-mid 1950s and up to almost the present day where Greenland’s ice is melting faster than anyone could have imagined it would even fifty years ago!

Gertner has had his own experiences in Greenland though he does not speak of them very much. Three-quarters of the book is about the explorers of the 19th and first half of the 20th century. They are elaborately cross-referenced into other published works about those explorations. Modern technology solved a lot of problems. The ice is much less dangerous if you can travel by tractor, snowmobile, or airplane rather than skis, snowshoes, and sleds pulled by dogs or humans. Ironically (Gertner doesn’t mention this) the technology that made all the present climatographic revelations possible also contribute to the warming problems uncovered. Airplanes, tractors, and giant core-drilling rigs belch-up a lot of carbon in the form of gas and soot.

The history is well written, the adventuring explorers all having one thing in common, their willingness, even desire to endure severe hardship, both physical and mental for the sake of what they took to be valuable scientific work. In another irony (also unmentioned), almost none of this early exploratory work was strictly necessary. These men made the first mid-ice weather observations and took the first temperature readings above (weather balloons) and below (to a few tens of feet) the ice. But none of these scattered measurements could answer the biggest question. Was the ice sheet stable? By the mid-to-late 20th century, systematic measurements on the ice and high above it (by aircraft and satellites) had utterly eclipsed all the earlier work, rendering it more-of-less moot.

It isn’t until the last chapters that Gertner gets into the present climatological problem. Here he also folds-in work presently being done in Antarctica. Everywhere in the world ice is melting faster than anyone imagined it would only fifty years ago. The impact of this on the world’s climate (and water supplies in Asia) will be profound, the single greatest impact (besides sea level rise) being the shut-down of the Atlantic heat exchange mechanism that cycles warm water to the north and cold water south. This mechanism depends on a certain salinity balance. Freshwater from the northern ice melt changes this balance. The effect, a slowing of the heat-exchange mechanism, has been already detected.

At the end, Gertner tries to sound an optimistic note, that humans will develop both the technology and political will to reverse what now appears to be an unstoppable disaster. Alas, what will happen in the next 75 or so years (likely much beyond) is already baked into the future climate. In 75 years there will yet be ice in Greenland and Antarctica, just not nearly as much as there should be. What is lost between now and then will be more than enough to destroy our 21st Century civilization!
Margaret M. Brogan
5.0 out of 5 stars Captivating
Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2023
This book captivated me from the beginning. It covers early exploration of Greenland up to the present. In this age of global warming it is particularly relevant. I listened to it the first time and recently purchased the book in order to read it again.
Happy Dog Owner
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow did I learn a lot about climate change!
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2021
I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to anyone who is either interested in the history of the exploration of Greenland or in the current status of climate change. The book presented a solid historical overview of the exploration of Greenland in quite a bit of detail. But, more importantly, the author did a good job of explaining the effects of climate change on the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. The most important take-away from this book is the urgency with which all countries need to dramatically rein-in their production of carbon. This normally abstract concept is brought to life in this book when the author explains the changes that are taking place in Greenland and how quickly these changes have accelerated over the past few decades. After you finish this book you will understand that the effects of climate change aren't happening in a linear fashion with "bad things to come in 2100", but they are taking place exponentially and really bad things are coming down the pike in the next 20-years or so.
Ward Walker
5.0 out of 5 stars History and Hope
Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2021
Much more than a look back at the struggles of exploring the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Arctic, interesting and amazing though they be, this book takes the reader through the advancements in equipment and technology that have led to an explosion of knowledge that makes it absolutely clear that climate change is definite and dangerous. Let there be no doubt to anyone who had the slightest doubt. The final chapter also provides a path to avoiding the worst of the consequences if we can just stop denying climate change and summon the political will to confront it. Compelling reading the further along I read.

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