The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner (PDF)

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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 ExtinctionNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The 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 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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Penetrating and engrossing . . . a captivating, essential book to add to the necessarily burgeoning literature on global warming.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Deeply engrossing and enlightening”—Booklist (starred review)“The Ice at the End of the World is a masterpiece of reportage and storytelling. What Gertner has found on Greenland’s remote glaciers is a harrowing tale of extremity and survival, as well as a harbinger of our own precarious future here on earth. Equal parts science, adventure, and history, this important book is a revelation, one that lingered for me long after turning the last page.”—Michael Paterniti, author of The Telling Room “Jon Gertner guides us on a perilous and fascinating journey to the remote island that lies at the epicenter of our understanding of climate change. With compelling prose and lucid scientific explanation, he tracks the explorers and scientists who, over two centuries, have tried to fathom the immensity and mysteries of Greenland’s inland ice. Both enlightening and disturbing, The Ice at the End of the World takes us on a gripping adventure into the thawing heart of global warming.”—Peter Stark, author of Astoria About the Author Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003 he has worked mainly as a feature writer for The New York Times Magazine. His first book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, was a New York Times bestseller. A frequent lecturer on technology and science history, Gertner lives with his family in New Jersey. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction The View from Above Late one afternoon in April 2015, I found myself standing on the side of a desolate airport runway in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, looking west toward an overcast sky. Next to me stood a group of NASA employees, all of them scanning the same gray clouds. There wasn’t much small talk. As the temperatures dipped below freezing, we blew on our hands and kept our eyes fixed on the horizon. “We’re running late,” Luci Crittenden, a NASA flight operations engineer, finally declared. She looked down at her watch, then stomped her feet to keep off the chill. Not long after, we heard a dull roar in the distance. And soon enough, we could see it coming—a stout-bellied U.S. Army C-130, trailing a plume of black exhaust. “Uh-oh, I think it’s on fire,” a woman standing next to me, Caitlin Barnes, remarked. I knew this was a joke—sort of. When the aircraft landed a few minutes later, the problem as far as I could tell wasn’t an overheated engine, but old age. The plane taxied down the runaway, made a quick hairpin turn, and came to a vibrating halt in front of us, its rotating propellers making a thunderous racket. If a dozen rusted rivets had popped off the fuse­lage, or if a wheel from the landing gear had rolled off, I would not have been surprised. The machine looked positively ancient. No one said much. But then Jhony Zavaleta, a NASA project manager, yelled over the din: “Nineteen sixty-five!” Apparently, this was the year the aircraft had been built. I wasn’t sure if Zavaleta was amazed by the fact or alarmed. And in some ways it didn’t matter now. For the next few weeks, barring any mishap, the C-130 would fly this group around Greenland, six days a week, eight hours a day. It had spent months in the United States being custom­ized for the task. Under the wings, belly, and nose cone were the world’s most sophisticated radar, laser, and optical photography instruments—the tools used for NASA “IceBridge” missions, like this one. The agency’s strategy was to fly a specially equipped aircraft over the frozen landscapes of the Arctic so that a team of scientists could collect data on the ice below. The IceBridge program had come into existence at a moment when the world’s ice was melting at an astonishing rate. Our plane’s instruments would measure how much the glaciers in Greenland had thinned from previous years, but the trend was already becom­ing obvious: On average, nearly 300 billion tons of ice and water were lost from Greenland every year, and the pace appeared to be accelerating. Yet it was also true that hundreds of billions of tons meant almost nothing in the vast expanse of the Arctic. The ice covering Greenland, known as the Greenland ice sheet, is about 1,500 miles long and almost 700 miles wide, comprising an area of 660,000 square miles; it is composed of nearly three quadrillion—that is, 3,000,000,000,000,000—tons of ice. In some places, it runs to a depth of two miles.1 And so the larger concern, at least as I saw it, was not what was happening in Greenland in 2015, or even what might take place five or ten years hence. It was the idea that some­thing had been set in motion, something immense and catastrophic that could not be easily stopped. Ice sheet collapse was not a topic of everyday conversations in New York or London. Even if you happened to know some of the more unnerving details—about rapidly retreating glaciers, for in­stance, or about computer forecasts that suggested the Arctic’s future could be calamitous—it was easier to think of the decline in ice as a faraway dripping sound, the white noise of a warming world. Still, by the time I signed on with the IceBridge team, the fate of the world’s frozen regions seemed to me perhaps the most crucial scientific and economic question of the age: The glaciers are going, but how fast? The ice disappearing from Greenland, along with ice falling off distant glaciers in Antarctica, would inevitably raise sea levels and drown the great coastal cities that a global civilization—living amidst the as­sumption of steady climates and constant shorelines—had built over the course of centuries. But again, the pressing question: How soon would that world, our world, confront the floods? Not long after the C-130 landed, we clambered up a staircase and stepped into the passenger cabin. We entered a long, cavernous room with a grime-streaked floor that smelled strongly of engine oil. Elec­trical cables snaked up the walls. Arctic survival packs swung from a ceiling net. I noticed a crude, freestanding lavatory toward the back of the room; an old drip coffeemaker and microwave oven were se­cured to a table along the far wall, with Domino Sugar sacks piled high on a pallet underneath. Positioned in the center of the cabin, in front of several rows of seats, were banks of gleaming computer con­soles and high-resolution screens. And bolted to the floor was a mas­sive instrument that resembled a cargo container you might attach to the roof of your car to haul gear on a vacation. This was a laser tool—an altimeter—to measure the height of the ice below. On the outside, the plane looked ready for the scrapyard. On the inside, it was a fortress of technology. I took another look around. The science team was already logging on to the computers, readying themselves for the schedule of flight missions that the IceBridge team would follow this year. The pilots, with fresh crewcuts, were introduced to us as aces recruited from the navy and air force. Then they, too, excused themselves so they could check the instruments in the cockpit and get ready. The first flight, I was told, would leave the following morning at eight-thirty sharp. “Be here or be left behind,” John Sonntag, the mission leader and a native Texan, told me after we walked back out to the tarmac. Sonntag had been deployed to Greenland more times than he could properly recall. He had an easy manner, a friendly grin. But he meant what he said. The work was too important to accept delays. His team had come here, pretty much to the end of the world, to understand how and why trillions of tons of ice were melting into the ocean. They were not acting on the assumption that they would soon find out, but with each flight and yearly mission, the data piled up: ice lost; water gained. The goal was to gather more and more evidence in the hope that it would ultimately lead us toward an answer—before it was too late. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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!

⭐Impeccably researched, full of important detail of the history, and characters, and implications of Greenland exploration and research

⭐I spent a year living at Kangerlussuaq, Greenland in 1985-1986 as an Air Traffic Controller for the USAF. The writer mentions on page 1, that “a stout-bellied U.S. Army C-130” was approaching. That is an error. The US Army owns no C-130s. If he wanted to be sure, all he had to do was read the USAF insignia on the aircraft. On page 2 he mentions that it was “trailing a plume of black exhaust” and someone in his group made the statement “Uh-oh, I think it’s on fire.” The writer then remarked that he “knew this was a joke—sort of.” Later in the same paragraph he states “If a dozen rivets had popped off the fuselage, or if a wheel from the landing gear had rolled off, I would not have been surprised.” The next paragraph shows one of the party discovered that the plane entered service in 1965, which I do not doubt. The writer is insulting the aircraft that made his research possible. The first C-130 was procured by the USAF in 1956 and the C-130 Hercules is the longest continuously produced military aircraft at over 60 years, with the updated Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules currently still being produced. C-130’s are used by over 60 different countries and the USAF currently has 518 in service. The U.S. Army has 0. All USAF aircraft are maintained to the ultimate degree and that is why you see an age as described. Ask any USAF pilot, (Cargo, Fighter, or Bomber pilot.) and they will describe it as a consistently reliable aircraft, no matter the age. If I was trusting myself to board an aircraft as he described, for the length of my studies, I would be a fool. But I’m not, and will climb aboard any C-130. The writer is insulting a workhorse of the USAF. With 10 of the world’s only ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules aircraft, commonly referred to as a Skibird, the New York Air National Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing is able to provide the airlift needed to get to remote locations in Antarctica and Greenland in support of the National Science Foundation. The aircraft the writer described came from a unit that does nothing except specialized extreme cold weather missions. The skill needed is a rarity. While I was in Greenland, I flew on two missions with the 109th Air Wing as a spectator to resupply the two DYE sites (part of the DEW Line) on the Ice Cap. I didn’t sit in the back, I was in the cockpit with a headset observing all. One landing on first approach, we were unable to find the landing “skiway”. (All it is is an area marked by orange flags on a white sheet of ice.) There was an icefog at 100 feet blocking our view. Pilot then says that for second approach, all eyes in the cockpit. If we miss it this time, we abort the mission and go home. Next approach, I’m standing behind the pilot and holding on to his seat. We get close when someone catches the flags, we make some pretty drastic maneuvers, and then land. I just flex my knees for touch down. So forget about a seatbelt. Then I deplane in the middle of nowhere. The icecap is a lonely place. But a beautiful place also. And the C-130 is a beautiful plane to get us there. If the writer did not even research that he was on a USAF plane instead of an Army aircraft, what else was just made up and conjectured in the book? Would you commit to boarding a plane for the next few weeks that you had just made such demeaning remarks of? When I find a major issue in the second paragraph of a book, it ain’t good.

⭐Loved the historical background, the attention to detail, and read it for my personal education.

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