Shopping CartExplorations: Reading Past Climates in Ice Cores
The results of ice core studies will continue to make news in the coming years. These two books and Web site will help you make sense of these news stories.
- Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). This book, by a leading climate scientist who has worked in both Greenland and Antarctica extracting and studying ice cores, is the best introduction to ice core science and the conclusions that can be drawn from these studies for nonscientists.
- Paul Andrew Mayewski and Frank White, The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002) is a little more technical than Alley’s book, but it is written for the public not fellow scientists. It has more on the sheer adventure of going after ice cores—Mayewski is a fellow of The Explorers Club. The book also has more on the politics of organizing and carrying out ice core drilling projects.
- National Ice Core Laboratory’s Why Study Ice Cores? Web page
