Customer Reviews

Ice Age (Penguin Press Science S.)

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When I first saw and bought Ice Age by John and Mary Gribbin, I thought that I'd give it to the school library straight away - it looked like a good little book that a high school student would be able to handle. Yesterday, I needed a short book to read, so I pulled it off the shelf. Ice Age is a very pleasant surprise. John and Mary Gribbin, a powerhouse science writing duo, have given us a nice, little essay on how we discovered the ice ages in the first place and how we discovered the main cause of those ice ages. This would be a great little book for someone to read before they took on one of the more difficult tomes on ice ages or climate change. I recommend this book to any one looking for a brief background on the history of the science surrounding the ice ages.

This little book by husband and wife team John and Mary Gribbin is a model of lucidity in scientific exposition. At first glance, it appears to be written for children, but it is an excellent introduction to the topic of Ice Ages and geologic history for ages ten to adult. Given all the talk about global warming, what a shock to learn that we are currently living in an Ice Age! I know it sounds crazy, but read the book! The Gribbins have written other science related books, and I plan to read some of them.

The authors do a very good job of explaining the evidence for ice ages and how the earth is currently in an inter-glacial stage within the overall ice age of the planet. The book discusses theories regarding the causes of the ice age from the movement of continents towards the poles as well as slight variations in the orbit of the earth around the sun that occur over time at regular intervals.

Though none of us reviewing the book will live to see a return to a glaciation phase in the ice age, it is interesting to note that we are well on our way towards the period when glaciation will occur again. The shortened growing season of such a period could spell disaster for our descendents.

I was deeply impressed with how much interesting and relevant information the authors were able to provide in a short little book. If you have a cross-country flight and you are looking for a really interesting book to read, this is one I highly recommend.

I found this in a used book store, read part of it, was instantly captured, and bought it. The authors describe with great clarity the causes of ice ages and the evidence that lead us to find out about them, beginning with the time before Milankovitch and ending with the present. Personally, I would have liked to read on.

Global warming is real, and this book succinctly explains how, when and why it has been happening during the past 10,000 years and the likely outcome if and when weather ever returns to normal.

But, to take a longterm view, there's been a cooling trend since the end of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Civilization, as we know it, began with global warming which started about 10,000 years ago. The emergence of modern humans began with a warm spell about 100,000 years ago. The big delay is due to an intervening Ice Age.

Though folks in Alberta, Alaska and Teec Nos Pos may not appreciate it for half of the year, we're now in the midst of a warm spell. If weather was normal, Minnesota might well be a "state of one massive ice sheet" instead of "the land of 10,000 lakes and 10 billion mosquitoes." Without global warming, the 'Day After Tomorrow' film would be real.

For better or worse, it doesn't address the current concern about human caused global warming. The emphasis is on how we came to know what we now know, a basic primer on weather plus some added background on past ice ages. The result is an excellent account of the procedures and values science as an intellectual process to discover how and why things work rather than providing a definitive and absolute answer to the unknown.

This is very small book - this fact is easy to miss on Amazon.
It is not popular science - this is only about how Ice Age theary was discovered with big portion of scientist's biographies - but practically no factual information at all.
I expected book about Ice Ages - not how they were discovered, so I was dissapointed.