The Hidden Life of Ice: Dispatches from a Disappearing World

For most of us, the Arctic is a vast, alien landscape; for research scientist Marco Tedesco, it is his laboratory, his life’s work―and the most beautiful, most endangered place on Earth.

Marco Tedesco is a world-leading expert on Arctic ice decline and climate change. In The Hidden Life of Ice, he invites us to Greenland, where he and his fellow scientists are doggedly researching the dramatic changes afoot. Following the arc of his typical day in the field, he unearths the surprising secrets just beneath the icy surface―from evidence of long-extinct “polar camels” to the fantastically weird microorganisms that live in freezing cryoconite holes―as well as critical clues about the future of our planet.

Not just a student of its secrets, Tedesco is an acolyte of the Arctic’s beauty―its “magnificence and fragility,” as Elizabeth Kolbert writes in her foreword. Alongside the sobering facts on climate change, Tedesco shares stunning photographs of this surreal landscape― as well as captivating legends of Greenland’s earliest local populations, epic deeds of long-ago Arctic explorers, and his own moving reflections.

This is an urgent tribute to an awe-inspiring place that may be gone all too soon. 16-page color photo insert

Marco Tedesco is a research professor of Marine Geology and Geophysics at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, located in Palisades, NY. Originally from Italy, he received his Laurea degree and PhD in Italy from the University of Naples and the Italian National Research Council. He went on to join the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a postdoc and later a professor and became the founder and director of the Cryosphere Processes Laboratory. Tedesco has been featured in Science and has spoken as a climate change expert for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Wired, and others.

Alberto Flores d'Arcais was born in Rome and graduated from the University of Rome with a degree in philosophy. He wrote for newspapers and magazines during the 1970s and became editor-in-chief of Frigidaire in 1980. He has reported on topics like civil wars, drug trafficking, the Arab spring, wars in the Balkans, and collapses of dictatorships since the 1980s; he is also well known for his interviews with world leaders and culture icons. In 2002, Alberto Flores d'Arcais earned the John S. Knight Fellowship for Journalism from Stanford University, and authored New York in 2007. He now spends his time between New York and Rome.

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Her journalism has garnered multiple awards, including a 2006 National Academies Communication Award for her three-part series 'the Climate of Man," which investigated the consequences of disappearing ice on the planet. She is author of The Prophet of Love, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015. She received the Blake-Dodd Prize, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 2017.