ENDS OF THE EARTH

Going to extremes.

There’s something forlorn and frightening, the biologist and science writer Shubin suggests, about being dropped off by a bush pilot in the Arctic wilderness, the opening moment in his book: Once the sound of the plane’s engines faded in the distance, “rocks, ice, and polar wildlife—along with the research we were there to do—were now our entire world.” Much of that research has to do with climate change and how it can be measured, let alone how it can be countered. There, the world offers two vast laboratories: the Arctic, most specifically Greenland, and the Antarctic, which, unlike its northern counterpart, is internationally administered and cannot be claimed by a single nation, the better—theoretically, anyway—to ensure international cooperation. There are plenty of surprises to discover in both places. One of Shubin’s goals is to study how glaciers move and, more specifically, melt away, as they are doing at an astonishingly rapid rate in Greenland: Writing of a Finnish research team’s findings, for instance, Shubin notes, “the Arctic warmed four times faster than the rest of the world since 1979,” with the resulting disappearance of sea ice. The Antarctic is melting more slowly but is melting nonetheless, and in interesting ways; Shubin takes readers under the Southern Ocean to look at how glaciers melt not from atop but from below, advancing and retreating measurably across the seafloor just offshore. It’s a discovery that he rightly finds unsettling: An astonishing diversity of viruses and bacteria is thawing out with the ice, and “the viruses released by melting glaciers could spill over to local plant and animal hosts.” All’s not hopeless, Shubin concludes in this accessible, nontechnical narrative—but, reading between the lines, there doesn’t seem to be much hope, either.

An alarming report from the ice caps.