Science on Ice

;Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised, ; wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard of his time with the 1910 Scott expedition to the South Pole. And that's how most of us still imagine polar expeditions: stolid men with ice riming their beards drawing sledges and risking death for scientific knowledge. But polar science has changed drastically over the past century-as Chris Linder shows us, brilliantly, with Science on Ice. An oceanographer and award-winning photographer, Linder chronicles four polar expeditions in this richly illustrated volume: to a teeming colony of Adélie penguins, through the icy waters of the Bering Sea in spring, beneath the pack ice of the eastern Arctic Ocean, and over the lake-studded surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Each trip finds Linder teamed up with a prominent science journalist, and together their words and pictures reveal the day-to-day details of how science actually gets done at the poles. Breathtaking images of the stark polar landscape alternate with gritty, close-up shots of scientists working in the field, braving physical danger and brutal conditions, and working with remarkable technology designed to survive the poles-like robotic vehicles that chart undersea mountain ranges-as they gather crucial information about our planet's distant past, and the risks that climate change poses for its future. The result is a combination travel book and paean to the hard work and dedication that underlies our knowledge of life on earth. Science on Icetakes readers to the farthest reaches of our planet; science has rarely been more exciting-or inspiring.