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

"I find Greenland fascinating. That’s really what drew me to the book initially, because I have written about a scientist named Willi Dansgaard, who worked with ice cores that were extracted from Greenland in the 20th century. That story is included in Gertner’s book. This book is a history of both the exploration of Greenland, starting in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then it becomes, from the mid-20th century onwards, a story of scientific investigation in Greenland. By the post-war period, the great heroic feats that were once needed to penetrate Greenland have been replaced by the relative ease of travel via airplanes and helicopters and ice tractors. As a result, you get a different kind of—I wouldn’t necessarily want to say heroism—a different kind of concern guiding engagement with Greenland, which is that Greenland can teach us things about our global climate that we desperately need to know. “Gertner shows how hard-earned our knowledge of climate is—and therefore how robust” One of the things that Gertner does really well is show how hard-earned our knowledge of climate is and therefore how robust. He does this not by telling but by showing in engaging prose that there’s a long history to the knowledge that we have about ice and climate from Greenland, and, importantly, how that history is linked with the histories of the people living in Greenland. So our knowledge is hard-earned and therefore trustworthy in a similar sense to the vision of science that Oreskes is arguing for, i.e. that it is done by groups of people. In the early period, Gertner does focus on key, heroic individuals (and the book is illustrated with some wonderful photographs of very handsome explorers in full fur regalia). But later he describes the shift to more collective undertakings. In this way, Gertner ultimately provides a different kind of collective history of knowledge-generation, where the collectivity spans hundreds of years. In the 1950s, Willi Dangaard realized that old ice in Greenland could be used to generate a record of past temperatures. It was an almost magical insight. Dansgaard recognized that oxygen has different isotopic variants that weigh different amounts and that their weight determines what ratio of them is present at a given temperature. Using this knowledge, he realized that it was possible to infer what temperature it was when a particular bit of snow was falling in the past. And because there is a two-mile thick ice sheet sitting on top of Greenland, consisting of snow that has never melted for hundreds of thousands of years, you can use that to generate a record of past temperatures stretching back for an incredibly long time. In Antarctica, they can go back several million years, but the first ice cores that were drilled in Greenland came up with 100,000 year records of past climate. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Gertner tells the story of the drilling. It happened initially at a secret sub-ice encampment called Camp Century that was built by the US military in Greenland when they thought it would be an important staging place in case of World War III . The military initially just wanted to understand the physics of ice and snow. For example: could you build a railway under the ice? How about a nuclear reactor? Turns out the answer is no, because the pressure collapses it incredibly quickly. While they were at Camp Century, the military drilled an initial core to investigate the way the ice behaved under pressure. That core was later obtained by Dansgaard, to do the isotopic research that showed that you could reconstruct past temperature with incredibly fine resolutions. The really stunning revelation was the degree of past climatic variability that the ice revealed. It revealed that the earth’s climate had the potential to change incredibly rapidly, much more rapidly than anyone had ever thought—even by ten degrees within human lifetimes. That discovery happened in the late 1960s and -70s, as did evidence about the effect rising amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was going to have on warming. So it was very important in the development of our understanding that, a) humans have dramatically altering the composition of important greenhouse gases, and, b) the earth’s climate system is not this stable beast that you can keep poking without it waking up. It’s actually liable to very rapid and violent change. There are other physical traces that also generate this kind of data, with differing degrees of resolution. You can extract similar information from mud at the bottom of the ocean, from sediment that’s been accumulating for millions of years. Stalactites also contain evidence of past, not just temperatures but also climate. There are ways to recapture the numbers of hurricanes, for example. Tree rings can provide very detailed annual records of past conditions, though not on the same time scales. That was one of the first methods that scientists used. Putting all these techniques together has yielded remarkable insights into the past climate of the Earth. Gertner tells us the slice of that story that that is linked to Greenland. By focusing on Greenland, he’s doing a little bit of what I think Lopez and Powers are also enjoining us to do, which is to pay attention to place. Individual places matter. Greenland’s been really important in helping us understand the global climate, but Greenland is also a specific location with a specific set of histories and cultures and experiences of those who have gone there, which has shaped the way our understanding has emerged. By using first-person perspective, Gertner places himself in that narrative, not in a heroic vein but in a personal one. He’s made many trips to the island in the course of writing this book and reporting on it. In that way, he demonstrates the power of a place to influence a person and how that again is essential to generating knowledge. That relationship between an individual and a place often gets completely erased in our conversations about climate change and global warming. We talk about a single number, how the Earth is going to warm by two, three, four, five degrees. That averaging over the globe is very hard to engage with as an individual. What does it even mean? That’s part of the reason these histories are so important, for those of us who can’t go and visit these places, to help us understand the empirical basis of the knowledge that we have and also the biographical or autobiographical basis of that knowledge. It is an amazing place. In a way, Gertner’s book is a testament to the history of obsession that surrounds Greenland."