COLD!
Adventures in the World's Frozen Places
By Bill Streever
Little, Brown, 292 pages, $27.99, ISBN: 978-0316042918
*****
The largest hailstone on record fell on Bangladesh, of all places, in 1896. It weighed almost a kilogram, but that's nothing. In 1849, a chunk of ice roughly seven metres in circumference fell near a farmhouse in Scotland. In Cold, Bill Streever will help you understand how these things happen.
As for the ice-encrusted boxer turtle that fell from the sky during a May, 1984, hailstorm in Bovina, Mississippi, Streever doesn't even try. It's there because it's a good story, which is mainly what Cold is about. This book is as good as "science writing" gets.
If you could distill Bill Bryson's gift for comic yarn-spinning with Jared Diamond's genius for sketching the relationships between ecologies and civilizations, you'd get something like Bill Streever, who also happens to be an eccentric biologist and cross-country skiing enthusiast from Anchorage, Alaska.
Let Streever follow his obsessions about what "cold" is, what it means and how it works, and you get Cold, which opens with Streever wading into the marrow-chilling water of Prudhoe Bay, 500 kilometres above the Arctic Circle, just to see what happens. He lasts a whole five minutes. Then off we go, through the grisly diaries of Arctic explorer Adolphus Greely, then up for a hike in the highlands of Scotland, then down into the microscopic space between temperature-sensitive enzymes inside fish.
Before you realize it's even happening, Streever is helping you navigate your way through the disputes about Harvard geologist Paul Hoffman's "snowball earth" hypothesis, which proposes that a hideous ice age covered almost the entire planet in vast blankets of snow about 700 million years ago.
It's refreshing that Streever doesn't deal much with climate-change anxieties until the last chapter, and it's also good to read the words "greenhouse effect" in their original meaning and context; without that greenhouse action, much the our planet would be as inhospitable as Mars. It's also somehow morbidly satisfying to learn how the effect's discoverer, Joseph Fourier, came to his demise. Fourier hated the cold and took to wrapping himself in blankets, thinking that it was good for his health. In 1830, wrapped up this way, he tripped and fell down a flight of stairs to his death.
It's also helpful to read the climate change controversies properly and succinctly spelled out, with sufficient witness to the presence of nutters at both ends of the clamour. We've had a half a million years of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels never exceeding 300 hundred parts per million, but since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, we're now pushing 400. It matters.
But to explore the meaning of "cold" - indeed, to inquire into any number of things - the geology, biota and chemistry of the world are not easily examined in isolation. Just as "the first line of a poem affects the last and the last line affects the first," natural history and human history are complicated affairs. While Cold makes room for suitably gruesome stories about frostbite amputations and cannibalism from the diaries of plucky Arctic explorers, not all those stories are so macabre.
Fridtjof Nansen sailed from Norway with 13 companions in 1893, intending to reach the North Pole by deliberately stranding his small vessel in drifting polar ice. The ice wouldn't co-operate, so Nansen and a companion set off on foot. They ended up coming closer to the pole than anyone had ever been. Nansen's journey took three years. He spent the depths of winter trying to perfect the art of sleeping, and attained "as much as 20 hours' sleep in the 24." He gained weight.
No stirring John Franklin ballads for this guy.
