The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age - Softcover

Bolles, Edmund Blair

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582431019 ISBN 13: 9781582431017

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2000

Synopsis

This is the story of three ambitious men and how their clash of egos, ignorance, and imaginations led to the discovery of the Ice Age. Louis Agassiz, extraordinary Swiss scientist and professor, conceived of the Ice Age and then spent decades trying to persuade other scientists he had not gone mad. Charles Lyell was his century's most influential geologist and a master politician among his fellow scientists. His scientific principles said an Ice Age was impossible, even after his eyes showed him it was real. Elisha Kent Kane, an adventurer, trapped for two winters at the top of Greenland, wrote a poetic description of a harsh and frozen landscape. His reports portrayed previously unimaginable great ice and set the stage for the story's unexpected outcome. The discovery of the Ice Age is one of sciences greatest and least-known stories. Like James Watson's The Double Helix and Dava Sobel's Longitude, The Ice Finders shows that, for all their boasting about reason, scientists are driven by their passions and obsessions - human traits that actually advance the evolution of scientific discovery.

About this title

Review

Edmund Blair Bolles is investigating a mystery: human creativity. Garbage in, garbage out is the rule for even the most intelligent machines; but with human minds, the rules change. Sometimes the rule is as true for us as for any computer, but every once in a while it's Ignorance in, insight out.

The example Bolles looks at is the Ice Age. Nowadays it's familiar to every schoolchild, but this familiarity has dulled our appreciation of just how wild an idea it once was. Earth-girdling floods seemed both reasonable and biblical, volcanoes unusual but not unknown. But a mile-thick sheet of ice covering much of the North Temperate Zone only 20,000 years ago was beyond anyone's experience or imagination.

The professor and the politician of Bolles's title are Louis Agassiz and Charles Lyell, two of the most famous geologists of the 19th century. The unusual character in Bolles's story is the poet: Elisha Kent Kane. To call Kane a poet is both over- and understatement: he was a celebrity, a romantic, a self-promoter, a mediocre explorer, and a particularly poor leader of men. He was also a dreamer who tried to find the lost Franklin expedition, and found the far north very different from his (or anyone else's) expectations: "dreams in, nightmares out." Yet it was Kane's bestselling book about his travels that brought the reality of great ice into the minds of laypeople and scientists alike: writes Bolles, "He is the one who made the Ice Age imaginable." --Mary Ellen Curtin

About the Author

Edmund Blair Bolles has been a professional writer for thirty years. His science books include So Much to Say, Remembering and Forgetting, and A Second Way of Knowing. He is the editor of Galileo's Commandment: An Anthology of Great Science Writing. He lives in New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1582431019
• ISBN 13: 9781582431017
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272