The ultimate volume on ice climbing is finally here! Renowned climbing veteran Jeff Lowe shares his personal stories and professional insight in this comprehensive book, which offers a history of this fascinating sport, and an overview of the world's best ice climbs. Includes detailed, fully-illustrated instructions for mastering both basic and advanced techniques, information on avoiding hazards, and much more. As someone who has spent too much of his ice-climbing time literally quaking in his boots, I've been on the lookout for a book that will help me to minimize my terror and maximize my joy in clawing up frozen waterfalls and steep alpine couloirs. Jeff Lowe's spectacular new book is just what I was searching for. The awe-inspiring photos and thorough how-to text promise to radically decrease my learning curve," John Harlin, author, The Climber's Guide to North America Please order Ice World from a US supplier if you reside in the USA
As the planet gleamed in his viewport, Sallman Ken could not believe that such a bleak and icy globe could have produced intelligent life. Yet when the expedition had sent in unmanned landers, that was what it had found. Some sort of native alien, surviving on the barren planet. But Sallman and his team were not the first to make contact. Smugglers from his own planet had begun trading with the natives for a new and virulent narcotic - the most dangerous drug in the universe. Now Sallman would have to find out how he could survive on a planet so cold that sulphur was solid and water was liquid - and how to stop the source of the deadly drug!
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 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.
From the mighty mammoths and deserts of ice to early explorers and polar survival, come face to face with one of Earth's greatest resources: ice. With captivating CGIs, illustrations, and photography, DK's Ice will take readers on an epic journey from the ice age to modern day, exploring how icy worlds are created, how creatures live in these harsh environments and the impact of climate change. Learn about early humans and how they survived in one of the most hostile environments on Earth, the tragic and treacherous journeys of early polar explorers, how icy landscapes develop and change, and meet the animals who make these frozen lands their home. Detailed annotations explore the place of ice on our planet and how we and other animals survive and interact with it. Ice is the perfect companion for any reader who wants to discover frozen worlds and the creatures that make them their home.
A co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize offers a clear-eyed explanation of the planet’s imperiled ice. Much has been written about global warming, but the crucial relationship between people and ice has received little focus—until now. As one of the world’s leading experts on climate change, Henry Pollack provides an accessible, comprehensive survey of ice as a force of nature, and the potential consequences as we face the possibility of a world without ice. A World Without Ice traces the effect of mountain glaciers on supplies of drinking water and agricultural irrigation, as well as the current results of melting permafrost and shrinking Arctic sea ice—a situation that has degraded the habitat of numerous animals and sparked an international race for seabed oil and minerals. Catastrophic possibilities loom, including rising sea levels and subsequent flooding of lowlying regions worldwide, and the ultimate displacement of millions of coastal residents. A World Without Ice answers our most urgent questions about this pending crisis, laying out the necessary steps for managing the unavoidable and avoiding the unmanageable.
From the author of Apocalyptic Planet comes a vivid travelogue through prehistory, that traces the arrival of the first people in North America at least twenty thousand years ago and the artifacts that tell of their lives and fates. In Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs upends our notions of where these people came from and who they were. How they got here, persevered, and ultimately thrived is a story that resonates from the Pleistocene to our modern era. The lower sea levels of the Ice Age exposed a vast land bridge between Asia and North America, but the land bridge was not the only way across. Different people arrived from different directions, and not all at the same time. The first explorers of the New World were few, their encampments fleeting. The continent they reached had no people but was inhabited by megafauna—mastodons, giant bears, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, five-hundred-pound panthers, enormous bison, and sloths that stood one story tall. The first people were hunters—Paleolithic spear points are still encrusted with the proteins of their prey—but they were wildly outnumbered and many would themselves have been prey to the much larger animals. Atlas of a Lost World chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters of early humans, and the animals whose presence governed the humans’ chances for survival. A blend of science and personal narrative reveals how much has changed since the time of mammoth hunters, and how little. Across unexplored landscapes yet to be peopled, readers will see the Ice Age, and their own age, in a whole new light.
Striking photographs by Kennedy and engaging essays by outdoor writer and fisherman Breining capture the quirky world of ice fishing--its natural beauty and solitary subzero vigils, along with its oddball practices and practitioners.
"Emma Holly loves to take a walk on the wild side," (Best Reviews) and here she ventures into a sensuous and dangerous world where a human courtesan becomes the flesh abd blood property of a demon prince. Soulmates, lovers - and victims of an unnatural desire that could drive them both insane.
Discover and explore worlds containing unexpected life. As some scientists search for life on the frozen planet of Mars, others are discovering life in unexpected places here on Earth. Frozen Oceans follows the expeditions of polar scientists in the Arctic and Antarctic as they investigate the life found in and around the ice caps, which cover up to 13 percent of the Earth's surface. Every year during the harsh polar winter, the surface of the ocean freezes, forming a temporary ice layer called pack ice, or sea ice. The Antarctic is the site of the greatest seasonal event on Earth. In March, the air temperatures drop to as low as -40°F, the ocean, which turns to ice at 28.7°F, starts freezing at the incredible average rate of 2.22 square miles per minute! This is the first book to explain in non-technical terms and show with color photography the abundance of life on, in and under the ice. Topics include: The nature of pack ice Pack ice regions of the world Life within a block of ice Microbiology inside the ice Mammals, birds and ice. Scientists are continually being surprised by the abundance of life where no life was expected. For many years, ice was seen as an obstacle to exploration and a threat to life. The ice is now perceived as central to global ocean circulation as well as global climate patterns. Frozen Oceans is a must for anyone with an interest in the polar regions, marine biology and the Earth's environment.
