A World Without Ice Book Summary - A World Without Ice Book explained in key points

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A World Without Ice summary

Name: A World Without Ice
Rating: 4.3 (24 reviews)
Author: Henry Pollack

Henry Pollack

What happens if climate change takes its course

4.3 (24 ratings)

16 mins

Topics

Climate Change

Table of Contents

A World Without Ice
Summary of 7 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Understand what it would mean to live in a world without ice.

Does ice mean a lot to you? Unless you live near one of the poles, your encounters with ice might be limited to the cubes you put in drinks and the local ice-skating rink.

However, there are some good reasons to take a closer look at ice and its place in the world. Why? Because polar and glacial ice have a decisive effect on Earth’s climate. And, scarily enough, due to the emission of huge amounts of greenhouse gases, Earth is warming and ice is melting at a rapid pace.

These blinks explain the role ice plays in Earth’s climate as well as how human activities became the main driver of climate change. You’ll find out about the severe and unavoidable consequences the disappearance of ice will wreak on our environment and the global economy. And, finally, you’ll learn about ways in which climate change can be mitigated.

You’ll also discover

where there’s ice that’s more than 10,000 feet deep;
what a great landscape artist ice is; and
why the next major wave of refugees will likely be created by climate conditions.

Not quite twins: the Arctic and the Antarctic are rather different.

In 1768, young English naval officer James Cook was assigned the position of captain on the search for Terra Australis Incognita. This was rather daunting, given that some didn’t believe that this southern continent existed at all.

Ancient Greek philosophical writings show the first arguments for the existence of a landmass in the southern hemisphere matching those in the north, for reasons of symmetry. But it wasn’t a mass of land that Cook first discovered. It was a mass of ice.

Given that Earth has masses of ice at the North and South Poles, the Greeks were right about the planet’s symmetry. But even though the poles might seem rather similar, they actually have very little in common.

The South Pole is located in the continent of Antarctica, around 850 miles inland from the nearest coastline. The North Pole, on the other hand, is located in the waters of the Arctic Ocean, around 450 miles away from the nearest landmass. Both poles are set in ice, but in varying ways. The South Pole lies below more than 10,000 feet of ice, while the North Pole floats on top of a relatively thin 10- to 20-foot sheet of frozen ocean water.

The ice in both polar regions is constantly shifting, but at very different rates. The South Pole’s ice masses move at a pace of 30 to 40 feet each year. At the North Pole, by contrast, the ice averages a speed of three to four miles each day.

These differences aside, humans have found the North and South Poles equally fascinating throughout history. Explorers, adventurers, whalers, sealers, scientists and soldiers have all made their way to the poles. Today huge numbers of tourists also journey to the Arctic and Antarctic. Arctic tours offer excursions to glaciers and wildlife tours where people can observe reindeer, walrus and polar bears in their natural habitat. Penguins are one of the main attractions in the Antarctic, with some 45,000 tourists heading south each year to experience these marine birds firsthand.

So should we be concerned for the safety of Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems given the rise of tourism at the poles? Actually, it only poses a marginal risk. Because what really damages the poles is what we do at home.

There are two key players in our planet’s climate: ice and the greenhouse effect.

Ever thought about what life without ice would be like? For starters, it’d mean no more ice hockey or drinks served “on the rocks.” But ice also has significance on a global scale, which means its absence would have a bigger impact than you might expect.

Ice has unique properties that make it a key player in our planet’s climate. As we know, ice is just plain old frozen water, or solid H2O in chemical terms. When most fluids solidify, they usually contract. But not water. When water forms ice, it expands in volume. Ice has a lower density than water as a result, which is what allows it to float without sinking! There you have the mechanics of the iceberg.

Our planet’s many ice ages over history have shaped our seas and landscapes.

If you took a trip back in time to Europe or North America 20,000 years ago, there wouldn’t be much to see. Why? Because back then everything was covered with a layer of ice two miles thick! That’s right, around 120,000 years ago, Earth saw the beginnings of an ice age that would last 100,000 years. And that was our most recent ice age.

In fact, ice ages are a rather common event in Earth’s history. As many as twenty ice ages have taken place over the past 3 million years. But hold on: how do we know this?

Several scientific methods allow us to reconstruct past climate changes and confirm the current global warming situation.

Some 20,000 years ago, the most recent ice age reached its end. The ice began to melt, Earth began to warm again and, over the next 10,000 to 12,000 years, it reached an average surface temperature a little hotter than today’s. But how can we be sure that’s what really happened?

Well, there are several methods we can use to reconstruct historic climate patterns. The first entails investigating tree rings. Every year, a tree grows a little and adds a new ring of materials around its trunk. In years when conditions are great for growth (not too hot or cold, not too wet or dry), these rings are thicker. Conversely, these rings are thinner in times of drought.

Human activities have driven climate change for centuries.

Our planet’s climate is subject to natural fluctuations. In the past these occurred so gradually that one century tended to look a lot like the next. The same can no longer be said today, as it is widely acknowledged that rapid global warming is the result of human activity.

This is no surprise when we consider how drastically humans have altered the land they live in. Forests have been wiped out to make room for agricultural land and housing is built with the resulting timber. The logging and burning of forests releases the CO2 contained in living trees into the atmosphere.

Climate change has concrete impacts for human life today.

Many of us tend to think that climate change is an abstract phenomenon, something that will happen far off in the future. Yet the opposite is true: climate change affects today’s ecology and economy in a big way.

Take glacial ice, for a start. Municipal systems and agriculture in the foothills and plains surrounding high mountains rely on melting glacial ice as their water source. This is the water that millions of inhabitants use to drink, flush away sewage and water crops.

Climate change is unavoidable, but we can learn to manage it.

So the big question is: Can we do anything to prevent global warming, melting polar ice and flooded coastlines? Though many attempt to stay positive, the short answer is no.

Climate change is unavoidable. For one thing, the sheer amount of greenhouse gases that have already been pumped into the atmosphere will have lasting effects far into the future. Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, lingers in the atmosphere for more than 100 years. Even if no CO2 were to be emitted into the atmosphere starting today, Earth would still warm by about 1°F – enough to turn the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska into desert, for example.

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What is A World Without Ice about?

A World Without Ice (2009) is about our planet, its climate, its human residents – and ice. Ice has always been a major player in Earth’s climate. These blinks explain why we may soon see a world without ice, why that would have dramatic consequences for Earth and humans alike, and how we can cope with climate change.

Best quote from A World Without Ice

Icebergs are to the polar imagination what cloud forms are to people elsewhere.

—Henry Pollack

Who should read A World Without Ice?

Anyone hoping for a sustainable future on Earth
Anyone interested in polar ice, icebergs, glacial ice and snow
Anyone interested in geology or politics

About the Author

Henry Pollack is a professor of geophysics at the University of Michigan. Together with his colleagues on the International Panel on Climate Change and former vice president Al Gore, he won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Pollack travels regularly to Antarctica and has conducted scientific research on all seven continents. He also the author of Uncertain Science. . . Uncertain World.

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