FROZEN IN TIME

A chill introduction to how ice cores are excavated and what paleoclimatologists can learn from them.

Drilling out ice cores and analyzing them may sound straightforward in principle, but as the author takes readers from remote sites atop glaciers or in forbidding polar locales to repositories such as the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center in Ohio, where the cores are preserved, a very different view of the challenges involved emerges. Van Vleet precisely describes the specialized gear and techniques, not to mention hazards ranging from 200-mile-an-hour Antarctic winds to what she dubs “the dreaded exploding ice core.” She also explains in specific detail how cores are transported to warmer climes, preserved, and then prepared for study. Along with indicating what the ice’s layers (as well as the solids and gases in them) reveal about past climate patterns, she fills in background information about natural climate cycles and the clear evidence that we are currently in a decidedly unnatural one. Van Vleet inserts both thought experiments and hands-on projects into each chapter and closes with substantial lists of online and video information sources. “It’s all pretty cool,” Van Vleet writes. Agreed. The photos are informative, if small and scanty; the few human figures not muffled in heavy weather gear are light-skinned.

Drills deeply into its subject.