The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change [Hardcover]

Paul Andrew Mayewski (Author), Frank White (Author), Lynn Margulis (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2002

An exciting account of revolutionary new discoveries for understanding the earth's climate, and their implications for future scientific research and global environmental policy.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Without an understanding of how the climate has fluctuated through time, we have no measure with which to compare current fluctuations. In an attempt to remedy this situation, scientists began drilling an ice core on the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1998. This ice core would then be analyzed to establish a long-term record of the climate and the environment. The Ice Chronicles is the history of that project, as told by its director, Mayewski, along with White (The Overview Effect). They explain how evidence of the climate over the last 100,000 years is held in the ice and how scientists have been using the ice core to decipher it. They also cover the political and scientific climate in which the project was developed, the technical difficulties of drilling an ice core in arctic conditions, and how natural and human-accelerated climate change can be distinguished. Mayewski relates his experiences working in the Arctic and Antarctic and makes the ice core understandable for interested readers. Recommended for academic libraries and for public libraries with a sophisticated clientele interested in global warming and climate change. Betty Galbraith, Owen Science & Engineering Lib., Univ. of Washington, Pullman
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Glaciologist Mayewski directed one of the bigger ice-drilling operations to date, the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2), undertaken in the early 1990s. Although its engineering was impressive, what was truly dramatic about GISP2 was what it revealed about the history of climate over the past 110,000 years. The information is presented in a highly accessible format: the book is packed with photographs of Mayewski's dozen-plus field trips to Greenland and Antarctica and copiously stocked with graphs tracking temperature against the dust, sea salt, and oxygen isotopes, among other elements, fixed in the GISP2 ice cores. Mayewski draws two central conclusions from the data: that climate has dramatically flipped in the past, sometimes in a decade's span, and that human influence is definitely impacting the contemporary climate. He discusses the attention the latter has attracted from international conferences; however, he underscores that changes in climate are not always predictable. The entertaining sidebars of Mayewski's risky adventures in the field will inspire younger readers to think about making his career their own. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: New Hampshire (March 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584650613
• ISBN-13: 978-1584650614
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #568,732 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A cool look at the overheated climate controversy, April 10, 2003

By 

Robert Adler "science writer & author" (Santa Rosa, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change (Paperback)

If you're interested in global warming and climate change, you're probably aware of how politicized the area has become, and how much hot air has been spewed by proponents and opponents of the idea that we humans are changing the climate, perhaps to a dangerous or catastrophic degree. In The Ice Chronicles, climatologist and arctic explorer Paul Mayewski and author Frank White bring cooler heads and cold, hard facts to the controversy.

The book, published in the fall of 2002, centers on the findings from the two-mile long ice core that Mayewski's team pulled from the center of the Greenland Ice Cap. This ice core, labeled GISP2, allowed scientists to track a wide range of climate variables in exquisite detail over the past 100,000 years. It produced many important findings that can help clarify the highly politicized climate controversy. The core reveals that Earth's climate is far from steady. Even without any contributions from manmade greenhouse gasses, ozone-depleting chemicals or particulates, regional and global conditions have swung from hot to cold and wet to dry many times, often with dramatic suddenness. Mayewski repeatedly makes the point that the climatologically calm, benign Holocene--the time period during which human civilization appeared and has developed--is a myth. The ten millennia or so since the end of the most recent ice age have been marked by two large global climate shifts, the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, and many less drastic but still potent changes. He also presents intriguing evidence that some of these changes contributed to the downfall of several ancient civilizations, including the Mesopotamian Empire around 1200 BC, the Mayan Civilization around 900 AD, and the Norse colonies in Greenland around 1400 AD.

My only real criticism of the book is that it may present more of the nitty gritty history and findings of the GISP2 project than most readers want or need. Still, most of this is put into boxes which readers can dive into or skip as they choose.

While the research findings and their implications are fascinating, perhaps the most important contribution the authors make is their perspective. The data Mayewksi himself uncovered show that the climate is a complicated and sensitive system, pushed from regime to regime by a variety of natural forces. But Mayewski is equally clear that human activities, most notably the marked and well-documented increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, have joined the party, and must be considered in order to understand current conditions or predict future climate change. And he is clear that unless we take sensible steps to reduce our impacts on the system, we risk not just global warming and whatever changes that would bring, but increased climactic instability and unpredictability. To the authors' credit, they attempt to bring some calm into the climate debates by propounding ten realistic, commonsense principles. The reflect that, "No matter what we do, the climate will change." But they also admonish, "We should strive more for climate predictability than control," and "If we cannot have global control of climate policy, we must at least have global cooperation."

The Ice Chronicles is well worth reading, both for the hard-won scientific facts it presents and explains so clearly, and for the constructive, down-to-earth perspective it provides.

Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation. (John Wiley & Sons, September 2002).

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ice Chronicles Overview, February 12, 2007

By 

Hubert H Lamb (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change (Paperback)

I liked this book! It is a balance between a personal history of involvement and the scientific results obtained. The book provides an overview of the Greenland ice core/climate project and results obtained that point to long time climate variation, the mechanisms involved, and geologically recent warming. Important chapter references are provided for a scientifically oriented reader who might wish to examine details of the research and findings in more technical papers. After documenting climate change, the author explores human contributions to global warming in relationship to those caused by natural earth-sun systems, and discusses policy choices that we might make in the face of the new evidence about the history of earth's climate.

20 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars yesterday upon the stair....., December 19, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change (Hardcover)

Primarily a history of an impressive project to analyse the layers of snow fall on the Greenland ice cap, the book suffers from lack of focus and from unfortunate efforts at being easily approachable and topical. It is strongest at revealing the influence of variation in earth's orbit on local Greenland (and nearby North American) climate, but even here the information is presented hurriedly and one comes away knowing little more of the various climaticaly significant orbital changes the data reveals.

At it's weakest point however, there is a sad attempt to relate the ice core data to global warming. This could be parodied as "there is no evidence of recent dramatic global warming in the ice core data, therefore global warming exists." To be kinder, the author feels "since I know global warming exists from other sources, the lack of data supporting global warming in my ice cores means this must be an entirely new sort of warming." There clearly is an easier explanation.