I love the cold and snow, so it’s no surprise that I ended up studying glaciers and ice sheets. I am also a big fan of history and a professor of Environmental Science who teaches climate and climate change to 200+ college students a year. I grew up reading nonfiction, and nothing changed–that’s my genre. Reading about history and how others have experienced our planet, especially far away and unusual places, intrigues me. My passion is communicating science by writing, speaking, and teaching, and these five books I’ve recommended all do an excellent job of making the science and history of Greenland accessible to everyone.
I wrote...
When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth's Tumultuous History and Perilous Future
This book had me shivering. Every chapter introduced another character and another set of often frightening but exhilarating arctic adventures spanning more than 100 years.
I found myself imagining what it must have felt like to cross Greenland’s ice on foot or to have spent the winter living in a rat warren of snow caves at the summit of the ice sheet with the Wegner expedition over the winter of 1930-1931.
An excellent read with well-referenced details and history galore. I couldn’t put it down and read the whole book in two nights.
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 • 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…
If you want to understand ice cores, this is your book. As a climate scientist, Alley taught me so much with this expert, clear-eyed but humble overview of ice core collection and analysis. I loved reading about GISP2, one of two Greenland ice cores that brought up rock and soil from below the ice.
I found this book powerful because the author was there when drillers extracted the core–he lived ice coring, and that made this a special read.
In the 1990s Richard B. Alley and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. In The Two-Mile Time Machine, Alley tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. He explains that humans have experienced an unusually temperate climate compared to the wild fluctuations that characterized most of prehistory. He warns that our comfortable environment could come to an end in a matter of years and tells us what we…
For me, this book was a time machine. Full of photographs and easy-to-follow stories, it took me back to the 1960s, under the ice, and inside Camp Century. I felt like a soldier bunking in the camp, an engineer starting up the reactor, and relived the frustration and loneliness of young men living in a dark, cold place for months on end.
Sure, they had unlimited steak and four meals a day in the mess hall, but they lived without family and fresh food. What a life on and off the ice!
Zuckoff’s narrative, reliving the first rescue by air of a plane downed on Greenland’s ice sheet, was a page-turner for me. I found Frozen in Time an easy read that told an intriguing story–the daring rescue followed by a tragic loss of life when the plane and its passengers vanish in a sudden fog.
I appreciated the suspense that Zuckoof built, as more than half a century later, he described the expedition that went in search of that missing plane–now deeply buried in ice. Like the book, I’ll keep you in suspense about how the story ends.
#1 New York Times bestseller! Frozen in Time is a gripping true story of survival, bravery, and honor in the vast Arctic wilderness during World War II, from the author of New York Times bestseller Lost in Shangri-La. On November 5, 1942, a US cargo plane slammed into the Greenland Ice Cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on board survived, and the US military launched a daring rescue operation. But after picking up one man, the Grumman Duck amphibious plane flew into…
As a geologist who studies snow and ice as well as rocks, I thought this book was a winner. Imagine being shipped off to east Greenland during World War 2 and living with a dozen men in a tiny station at the ice sheet's edge. Almost mundane until a plane goes down on the ice – and then all bets are off. It’s rescue time.
I marveled at the stories Hansen told–intrigued by his ski adventures when he had spare time and then daring trips across the ice sheet in some of the first over-snow vehicles. I felt like I was reading one man’s journal–his thoughts about ice, cold, and isolation in a stunningly beautiful place.
Stationed at a lonely wind-pounded outpost in an isolated backwater of World War II, the nineteen men of the Greenland Ice Cap Detachment were charged with erecting a weather/rescue station on the ten-thousand-foot-high Ice Cap to serve the Polar aircraft-ferrying route to Europe and to provide vital weather data for the expanding war effort. Greenland's Icy Fury is a lighthearted accounting of one of the least accessible and least known but most stunning parts of the globe--southeast Greenland--and its natural history, geography, geology, glaciers, and foremost, its savage weather and awesome climate. The Polar route to Europe afforded stepping stones…
Greenland is an island of extremes at the top of the world. Today, its melting ice is an icon of climate change. But in the 1950s, Greenland was the epicenter of the Cold War. Fearing a Soviet invasion, the US Army fortified the island and built Camp Century, a base warmed by a nuclear reactor and housing 200 men inside Greenland’s ice sheet.
Through the lives of several generations of scientists, engineers, and soldiers, this is the story of the importance of Greenland to our future. The book is an environmental history of science, climate, and Cold War exploits but also a look to the future as the ice sheet, melted by our warming planet, pours into the ocean, raising sea levels and reshaping the world’s coastlines.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
