The Ice at the End of the World

Journalist and historian Jon Gertner traces how Greenland, an island five times the size of California with just 56,000 people, became the planet's biggest scientific laboratory after being one of its last frontiers. Gertner follows the explorers who arrived around the turn of the twentieth century on foot, on skis and on crude motorized sleds, on expeditions of up to a year that often ended in frostbite and tragedy. They gave way to scientists who camped on the ice and drilled a mile or two down for cores that could reveal hundreds of thousands of years of the planet's past. As its ice melts, hundreds of millions of people along coasts could be affected.

Elizabeth Kolbert endorsed it, noting that Gertner takes readers to places few journalists or even explorers have reached, and called it an important book.