Dear Reader,
Some news: we have a logo! Huge thanks to Charioteer Josiah Fisk for coming up with our very own signature frugal chariot, with a nod to the Panetta family’s roots in Italy: a donkey cart. Merch etc. is coming to celebrate FC’s first anniversary.
I had two chances this week to appreciate that things can change in an instant. On Tuesday, I had a tire blow out while driving on busy Storrow Drive in Boston. On Wednesday, my beloved horse Whitman suffered an injury so severe that I will probably never ride him again. Fortunately, we are both still here, and making our way in life.
This week’s book is by a scientist who has dedicated her career to understanding how glaciers work, and how they are changing. On the geological time scale, glaciers are changing in the equivalent of an instant.
Review
Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity
Jemma Wadham
Princeton University Press, 2021
256 pages
$26.95
In her recent piece “Five Myths About the Arctic,” environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth makes the case that standby adjectives for the region like “untouched” and “remote” have become invalid and unhelpful. Joining with arguments made by Sheila Watt-Cloutier in The Right to be Cold (see FC Issue 39), Demuth writes, “Today, pipelines crisscross Arctic land, bringing petroleum to southern markets. Pollution — including plastics in the ocean and carbon in the atmosphere — billows toward the pole, while northern wildfires send particulates into the lungs of people thousands of miles south.”
About that carbon: global warming, especially at polar latitudes, means that humans have pulled the Earth’s glaciers into a tight, close embrace. They may look remote, and they may still appear pristine, but we’ve done the equivalent of hauling them into a truck-stop parking lot and making them breathe the fumes 24/7. Glacier news now offers its own sub-genre of doomscrolling, as scientific reports of thinning, retreating, melting, and calving portend ever-increasing amounts of sea-level rise for the 21st century and beyond.
But what are glaciers actually like? How do they work? And what is it like to be one of those hardy scientists who are attempting, amid harsh conditions, to make sense of their complex dynamics? Jemma Wadham’s engaging and touching memoir Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity steps in to answer these questions. Wadham grew up in the UK, and fell in love at a young age with exploring and climbing in Scotland’s Cairngorms (see FC Issue 40). She discovered glaciology as an undergraduate, volunteering on a summer expedition to the Haut Glacier d’Arolla in the Swiss Alps. Of her first steps on ice she writes, “The repetitive crunch as the brittle surface crust shatters beneath your feet, combined with the mesmerizing sensation of walking upon a block of shifting ice some hundreds of metres thick — the sense of mystery and danger never dulls.”
Wadham, one of the world’s leading glaciologists and a professor at the University of Bristol in the UK, offers a crisp, illustrated primer on the characteristics and processes of glaciers (did you know that they have three ways of flowing?), before sharing her field research experiences from around the world in roughly chronological order. This structure works well, as it provides a framework for her parallel stories of personal and professional development. In contrast to forest ecologist Suzanne Simard (see FC Issue 13), who encountered an entrenched “old boys’ club” culture in her field and considerable opposition to her findings, Wadham enjoyed both supportive academic mentors and the eventual opportunity to become one herself.
Some of the best writing in this book has to do with the joys and challenges of being in the field.
I remember practising ice-axe arrests by throwing myself down a practically vertical slope; learning how to rope up to cross crevasses; and, most essentially, teaching myself how to imbibe throat-scorching eau de vie at altitude while still commanding control of my legs . . . The communal mirth of field-camp life was infectious. I had never laughed as much before — in short, I was hooked.
Dodgy journeys on snowmobiles, tent failures, sudden torrents, Walkman solo dance parties, and of course polar bears are all part of life on and near the ice.
Wadham also brings the reader into the technical and intellectual challenges of her research, and she has a special knack for describing the questions she has been trying to answer and the nitty-gritty of her research methods. She has been a pioneer in showing that glaciers are full of life, providing homes to single-cell organisms that serve an essential role in cycling materials that become nutrients at the base of the food chain, as they flow out into rivers and oceans. She is generous in highlighting the work of her collaborators, including the engineers who helped her transform her standard field instrument bench into a “Lab-on-Chips” that played an important role in her hunt for life in Antarctica’s cryolakes (yes, cryolakes are a thing!).
Ice Rivers might not have been written had it not been for the benign yet life-threatening cyst that was discovered on Wadham’s brain in late 2018. Wadham had been operating at top speed at the highest levels of her field, all while teaching and running a busy research institute at her home university. After successful surgery restored her to health, the ensuing recovery period offered space and time for reflection and writing. What ultimately makes this book so moving is the manner in which Wadham’s own brush with mortality during her forties intertwines with her research on these vast, life-giving landscapes that are “dying early” in a geologic sense, with enormous implications for human communities. It would have been a tragedy for Wadham to die young. It will be a tragedy for life on Earth if the European glaciers disappear by the end of this century, if these great ice sheets collapse because humans failed to reduce carbon pollution.
About a year ago, in an interview in the New York Times, Elizabeth Kolbert said something that has stayed with me: “I wish there were more popular science books written by scientists.” She’s right. There is no substitute for a book like this: an expert’s treatment of a crucial topic, told through the lens of lived experience and with the deepest feelings of the human heart.
Other Voices, Other Forms
The team at PBS’s Nova has created a fascinating series titled “Antarctic Extremes,” which is available on the PBS website and also YouTube. These short-form documentaries offer glimpses into the lives and work of a range of researchers involved with Antarctica. In this episode a PlayStation controller is adapted to guide a robot exploring a deep glacial cave.
Poem of the Week
Poet Peggy Shumaker is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Here is her poem “Exit Glacier” via The Poetry Foundation.
Exit Glacier BY PEGGY SHUMAKER When we got close enough we could hear rivers inside the ice heaving splits the groaning of a ledge about to calve. Strewn in the moraine fresh moose sign— tawny oblong pellets breaking up sharp black shale. In one breath ice and air— history, the record of breaking— prophecy, the warning of what's yet to break out from under four stories of bone-crushing turquoise retreating.
For Your Reading Radar
Little Toller in the UK will soon release Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration, by film scholar Davina Quinlivan. In this lyrical meditation, the author explores her roots in India and Myanmar and her complex family history, as she seeks to find a sense of home in England.
For Your Calendar
This event may have special resonance for those of us in the Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret generation. A harmonic convergence will occur on Tuesday, March 1st at 8 PM Eastern, when Margaret Atwood will appear in conversation with Judy Blume about Atwood’s new essay collection Burning Questions, which deals with our time of overlapping crises. The virtual event is co-sponsored by an array of indie bookstores in Canada and the US, so check your favorites to see if they are involved. Here’s the link to register via Books and Books in Miami.
Bookshop of the Week
Since Jemma Wadham teaches at the University of Bristol in the UK, we get another bite (see FC Issue 14) at the tasty apple that is Bristol’s bookshop scene. The unusual name of this week’s store is a nod to a passage from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The shop is located in a charming arcade, with two wings that encompass an inventory of 25,000 books.
Because have other writing deadlines coming up, I am going to take the Presidents’ Day weekend off. Thanks for your kind understanding. xo Nicie
What happened to your horse? :-(. Thank you for your great review. The poem toward the end got to me, because I hiked Exit Glacier in 2012, and there were signs leading to its edge marking how it had retreated over the decades. I wonder how much it has retreated in the decade since I got to marvel at it?