Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains

by Mark Bowen

Book Overview

"One of the best books yet published on climate change . . . The best compact history of the science of global warming I have read."--Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books The world's premier... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805064435
• ISBN13: 9780805064438
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 463 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.8" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Climate change for beginners

My son recommended and bought this book for me. At university studying environmental science he started as a sceptic on anthropogenic climate change. He read widely. This book inspired him by clearly portraying the excitement of scientific discovery. Written by a physicist it describes the career of Lonnie Thomson an ice-core specialist and his research group. He had to fight bureaucracy to get to collect and analyse ice cores from the world's tropical ice fields. They have spent more time above 22,000 feet than any others. In parts it reads like a mountaineering epic such as Annapurna. But all the heroics are clearly determined by scientific goals. It is a story of team work and the excitement of discovery. They made the connection between ancient climate change and rise and fall of civilisations from ice cores dated to a single year or even a season of a single year. This is complementary to a more detailed account of rise and fall of civilisations Collapse by Jared Dimond. Bowen, being a physicist, provides a simple clear explanation of carbon dioxide rise and its connection to climate change. This book concentrates on the science and pre-dates but underpins the latest IPCC reports on the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change. My son has converted to believer and is vigorously pursing a research career after being inspired by this book. It is a well written and gripping account of modern day science which should be widely read. Thoroughly recommended.

Climate science + mountaineering + more = Superb book!

This is one of the best books I've picked up in years. Mark Bowen has produced a landmark piece of work. It's both extremely informative as well as being very readable. The story centers on ice cores pulled up over the last 25+ years from the fast-disappearing glaciers on the tops of the world's highest mountains -- a grand adventure in itself -- with the results being put in the context of the current science of the greenhouse effect and global warming, the possible environmental collapse of numerous ancient civilizations (since the ice core records go back many thousands of years), with just enough on the politics of controlling carbon dioxide emissions and the way scientific research is done to keep things interesting and real. As someone who tries to keep up with scientific developments -- as difficult as that is with the major news media being myopically focused on sensationalism and celebrity (right now it's the JonBenet Ramsey rerun...) -- I felt like I was being caught up on all the many important details and various threads of a story that I already sorta knew the larger outline and implications of. If I had one complaint it was that the book seemed to need many more graphs than the single one it contains. Some of the subject matter is just technical enough that this would have been much better than the several paragraphs of carefully constructed words needed to convey the same idea. I suppose publishers think that it'll scare off too many customers if they see graphs in a book. Highly recommended and deserving of much more attention than it's received (based partly on the paltry number of reviews here). Buy a copy for yourself and an additional one to give to a friend or colleague.

Wonderful book - in several dimensions

This is travelogue, musings, science, story-telling, and a gentle (non-polemic) argument about a critical present-day issue. The previous reviewers (especially the first two) and Bill McKibben's dust-jacket comment are good guides. Some of the author's descriptions of mountain scenery are quite beautiful. Although I always have been concerned about climate change based on the "precautionary principle" and "responsibility to future generations" ideas, this book helped me put some meat on the thin bones of my understanding. It also reached me at an emotional level, since the reader spends so much time with the scientists and get a close-up view of how they arrive at their understandings. The book does not simply follow a chronological narrative, but branches off for visits to related topics. I found this style of organization effective and fun. (Like a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon where you frequently stop for a day to explore side canyons.) There are 24 pages of notes and 21 pages of (about 400-500) references.

Quest at Quelccaya

For years it's been a given among climatologists that the first and most severe indications of climate change - "global warming" - would be at the Poles. Without intending to, Lonnie Thompson has been slowly but steadily revising that dogma. Real change, he tells us through Mark Bowen's account, is already visible in the retreat of glaciers. The dynamics of high altitude atmospheric processes, particularly in equatorial regions, are shrinking glaciers at an alarming rate. Thompson's investigations demonstrate that our warming world is in serious difficulties. Bowen, who is a physicist and a recreational climber, is able to impart the work of Thompson and his colleagues with enthusiasm. Bowen virtually takes you by the hand to share his experiences in glacial ice extraction and measurement. The analyses erase the last doubt about climate change and our need to reduce our contribution to it. Although Thompson is the centre of this story, the real pioneer is John Mercer. Described by Bowen as "touched by genius", it was Mercer who effectively initiated investigation of "tropical ice" - when he wasn't jogging naked through city parks. Although the studies were originally intended to map the actions of Ice Age glaciers, investigation became more comprehensive. Now, glacial ice is revealing the pace of change is faster in our era than in the past and accellerating rapidly. The problems resulting from that meltdown are, and will continue to be, severe. Beyond the raising of sea levels from melting ice, changes in the weather are locked into feedback loops that are already having serious impact on human endeavours. Bowen's depiction of Andean societies' reaction to drought and catastrophic rainfall should give any reader pause. Lacking water, all farming communities, ancient or modern, suffer and die away. Any civilisation relying on them will follow in collapsing. Nor is the evidence and the issues confined to the Andes and lost civilisations. Asian mountains are being exposed by withdrawing ice. The meltwater upon which millions in China, India and other nations in the area depend, is disappearing as you read this. What might have been an adventure story by a part-time climber and full-time scientist, instead becomes a serious account of what Lonnie Thompson has been revealing. Rather, what he has enticed from the ice. The drilling operation and the transport of ice make thrilling reading. We are teased along over whether the ice can be carried off a mountain top to a shipper by hot air balloon. We learn that there's more than one way to plunge a drill into ice. Once it's down there, can we coax it back to the surface? What's entailed in climbing high mountains besides altititude sickness? One of Thompson's students, who seemed mostly resistant to that affliction succumbs to an entirely different one. A porter, lugging a large chest of cores down Kibo, loses control with disastrous results. Yet, through it all, Thompson do

A Rich Tapestry of Science and Biography

This is a hard book to categorize because it contains so many valuable treasures. Five major strands are woven together into a highly readable and enjoyable narrative. As a biography, it tells the story of Lonnie Thompson, a contemporary climatologist, his passion for scientific understanding, and his integrity and physical and intellectual courage. Drilling ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica has been a major source of knowledge of the climatic history of our planet, its temperature changes, and the composition of its atmosphere. But Lonnie Thompson realized that ice cores taken from glaciers found on high mountains closer to the equator held valuable secrets of the earth's climatic history not found in polar ice, and that they were essential to our understanding of global climate change both historically, and for modeling and predicting future changes. Furthermore, this valuable historical record is rapidly disappearing. Glaciers, with records of up to 700,000 years, are quickly shrinking. Kilimanjaro's will vanish completely within ten to twenty years. But until recently, there was little understanding, funding, or academic prestige within the scientific establishment for drilling for equatorial ice. Thompson's persistence in obtaining these ice cores, and the contributions they have made to science are the overall theme of the book. It is to some extent a mountaineering book, but this is a subtheme. Mark Bowen, a scientist, writer and mountaineer, was invited to join Thompson on several high mountain expeditions, and describes these and others as well. Thompson took ice cores from glacial peaks in the Andes of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, from Kilimanjaro, and from the Himalayas, and the mountains north of the Tibetan plateau. The hardships and danger of high altitude mountaineering, and the logistic difficulties of transporting equipment, and bringing back ice samples are vividly detailed. However, Thompson, and the international team of scientists who worked with him over many years never climbed a mountain for the sport of it, but were always motivated by their passion for science. Third, this is the story of the science of climatic change, and the gradual unfolding of our understanding of it over the past 150 years. The details revealed themselves slowly as more data was obtained from many places in the world, and from many sources, not just ice cores, but sea bed drilling, biological sampling, and others. And as the data emerged, the sophistication of mathematical correlating and modeling also matured. The clarity and detail of our understanding of both the past, and possible future scenarios continues to mature, but scientific consensus at the present leave little room to doubt that global temperature will rise as atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by burning fossil fuels increases, that polar ice will continue to melt, that the ocean level will rise significantly, that extreme weather will increase, and that global patterns of wet a