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Foreword Little seems more sure than the obvious fact that spring follows winter and summer, spring. Those in the sunbelt may welcome the relatively seasonless climate of the South, whereas those of us enamored of deep and quiet snow, like author Paul Mayewski, find fascination in the frigid wilds of Antarctica’s landscape. Here, from firsthand experience with one of Nature’s longest and greatest books—the record of weather preserved deep in ice—Mayewski tells us as true a story as can be gleaned about the realities of climate stability and patterns of weather. In The Ice Chronicles, we are gifted with a genuinely popular account of weather shifts, one in which casual opinion and “the misplaced concreteness” of theory are eclipsed by prodigious quantities of information. The clear voice of co-author Frank White, an expert on the experience of cosmonauts and astronauts who circled or escaped our Earth, penetrates the planet’s cloud shroud. Finally, we follow here a guide map to climate change that dispenses with hype and hyperbole, the stock-in-trade of this tricky, international, and politically charged issue Ask yourself now: Have you ever lived for more than a few months in a climate that genuinely differs from that of your childhood? Those of us who have know in some deep place in our being that weather and climate powerfully alter our moods, motivations, and habits. Some take for granted that more or less what came last year will come again this time. Few in the northeastern megalopolis of North America know that just after the great explosion of Krakatoa in 1883 the summer in Vermont was obliterated. Snow remained on the ground in July, and no harvest followed. None of us, even scientists with professional interests in the history of planet Earth and its biosphere, fully knows the measured story of the great ice core that White and Mayewski chronicle. As much as any of us, Mayewski enjoys the balmy summer sun and warm tropical breezes, but unlike nearly everyone, he has spent his professional life in Greenland, Antarctica, and other inhospitable landscapes , where he has worked as a geologist and climatologist in pursuit of the rhythm and reason for staggering winds and bone-chilling cold. “Dancing snow” means trouble. He describes a time in Antarctica when it gave him no option and tells how his battle and that of his colleagues required patience: “We stopped right there, pitched our tents, and prepared to wait the storm out. . . . We had brought along a 120-pound generator that kept jumping around on its platform, and we needed every piece of climbing rope and all of our extra climbing screws to tie down the generator and our tent.” They knew that such storms might take up to ten days to dissipate.“Rescue was unthinkable; we couldn’t expect the people there at McMurdo Station [100 miles away] to risk their own lives. . . . We took turns holding up a piece of plywood against the wind wall of the tent to keep the whole thing from collapsing. That fabric was all that stood between us and a very serious situation.” They couldn’t even risk sleeping. Only Lady Luck limited that particular tempest to 72 rather than 240 hours and granted them a faster escape. People respond differently to rapid environmental changes, but all of us respond. Mayewski remembers a Himalayan trip during which he awoke to the sound of some porters who had returned to camp after an evening down-mountain with their families. Unbelievably, they had departed at dusk from 18,000 feet, eaten well only after sundown (for it was Ramadan), slept a few hours at 7,000 feet, began their return at 2:30 a.m., and now, with their beagle in tow, refreshed but still barefoot, they were ready for and cheerful about the next leg of the climb. This, for these porters, was the way of life. But why was it becoming so for a young professor from New Hampshire? Curiosity about why climates are stable and why they change lies at the heart of why they wrote and why we read this story. White’s way with words and his own fascination with Mayewski’s story are overshadowed only by the observational and analytical science of the story chronicled here. The real central characters are not the co-authors, the Himalayan porters, the bush pilots and international scientific staff at Antarctica, the National Science Foundation sages who recognized the...

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