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Cold weather systems the earth needs to thrive is the subject of Streever's well-documented book, using all of the author's expertise from his field trips to the world's most frigid environments. Streever, who chairs the North Slope Science Initiative's Science Technical Advisory Panel, writes of the frostiest experience: "We fail to see cold for what it is: the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force." Rather than giving the reader a dry, academic lecture on snow, glaciers, wind-chill factors and icebergs, he delivers a poetic, anecdotal narrative complete with polar expeditions, Ice Age mysteries, igloos, permafrost and hailstorms. Two of the most fascinating segments are the arduous task of scientific reconstruction of past climates and the magical navigation of migratory birds to warmer lands. This is a wonderful collection of one man's first-rate observations and commentary about the history and importance of cold to the earth and its occupants. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Open this book to any page and be treated to a tidbit about the cold, its effects on animals, on history, on the world. Do frogs and caterpillars actually freeze solid and then revive in spring? Have you ever heard of the School Children's Blizzard that froze cattle standing in place? What is the difference between hypothermia and frostbite? Biologist Streever explores benign cold, threatening cold, and monstrous/scary cold not only through history and science books but also in person, in Alaska and other frozen spots around the world. The author knows what he is talking about. He has worked in Arctic Alaska and chairs the Science Technical Advisory Panel of the North Slope Science Initiative. This reviewer found Streever's book more consistently enticing than Mariana Gosnell's Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance. Written in a popular, accessible style, Streever's book also includes 34 pages of notes. Recommended for public libraries.
—Betty Galbraith
Author's Note xiv
Preface xv
July: Explorers, victims of cold, and immersion in thirty-five-degree water north of the Arctic Circle 3
August: A tunnel in ground frozen for forty thousand years, landscapes changing as temperatures rise, and animals harmed warmth 28
September: The Little Ice Age, the Pleistocene Ice Age, and the ancient ice age of Snowball Earth, when the entire planet was veiled in ice 50
October: Animals coping with cold, migrating by the millions, and hibernating with body temperatures below freezing 75
November: Skis and skiing, a trail closed by a late-season bear, and freezing trees releasing a burst of heat and flushing the fluid from their cells 94
December: Overheating in the depths of winter, shadows of Weddell seals in the sea ice, and Japanese ama divers in water cold enough to kill most humans 114
January: Weather patterns that cause frigid conditions, medieval weather forecasters burning at the stake, and a frozen ocean 136
February: Plummeting temperatures, the cooling of Westminster Abbey, and approaching absolute zero and the death of matter 156
March: A search for polar bear dens near forty below zero, winter apparel, igloos, quinzhees, and a house instrumented to measure cold 175
April: Frost-heaved roads, broken pipes, crops destroyed by frost, and 143 caribou killed by an avalanche 191
May: The end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, rising sea levels, howling winds, receding glaciers, and mammoth carcasses in thawing ground 208
June: Fourier's greenhouse effect, Revelle's geophysical experiment, debating science, and the melting Beaufort Sea 227
Maps 244
Acknowledgments 247
Notes, with a Few References, Definitions, Clarifications, and Suggested Readings 249
Index 285
Readindg Group Guide 293
Anonymous
Posted October 17, 2009
This book was poorly organized and repetitive. It needed a more disciplined and demanding editorial hand. It contains lots of facts but has no compelling narrative and only an artificial structure.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 10, 2010
I Also Recommend:
This book brings the northern climate and its effect on animals, plants, humans and history into the hands of the reader. A comprehensive look into what those of us in the north live with. History, geology, anthropology and storytelling bound together in a most readable and enjoyable story.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.JamJB
Posted January 2, 2010
Filled with arcane information, this lovely, lyrical book takes you all over the world and makes you feel the physical presence of each site. The author seems to know just about everything there is to know about COLD, from the scientific to the anecdotal, and he brings all of his knowledge to bear. He is also willing to share what seems like a lack of compassion or at least a lack of empathy as he tells you of his scientific observations of a friend losing the feeling in her hands...or telling you how he got a London taxi driver to be still.
This is the kind of book you can open anywhere, and enjoy what's there. What you remember will be what you bring with you and how his verse relates to your thoughts.
kaycashman
Posted December 5, 2009
Author Bill Streever, who chairs the North Slope Science Initiative's Science Technical Advisory Panel, structured Cold with a chapter for every month starting with July. He opens each with an account of his own experience.
Here are a few excerpts from a review of Cold I wrote for Petroleum News:
Streever is the science teacher we all want for our children; a guide who introduces them to the natural world, enticing them away from video games, I-Pods and cell phones.
Unfortunately, Bill Streever is not a teacher, but as an author who brings alive the magic of planet Earth's past, present and future, he's the next best thing. ....
Polar explorers, Streever says in the first chapter, are "great keepers of journals . whose history becomes one long accident report mixed with one long obituary," the details of which he repeatedly shares with us.
In the first chapter, which opens 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, with the author taking a five minute plunge into the Beaufort Sea, we learn about Dutch navigator Vitus Bering. In 1741, "several hundred miles southwest" of where Streever is standing ... Bering "lay down in the sand and died of scurvy and exposure, while his men, immobilized by scurvy, cold, and fear, became food for arctic foxes.
"Some accounts," Streever writes, "hold that Bering spent his last moments listening to the screams and moans of his dying men."
While we are contemplating the horrible deaths of Bering and his men, Streever throws in a geography lesson - the Bering Sea that separates Alaska and Russia, and the island where Bering died, "nestled on the international date line," were both named after him.
Turn the page and we discover that frogs, whose northernmost limit is about five hundred miles south of Streever's bathing spot, overwinter in a frozen state, "amphibian popsicles in the mud. Frogsicles," he calls them. ....
A lesson-bite in the history of measuring temperature becomes more interesting when you learn that Daniel Fahrenheit's invention of the mercury thermometer was "modified by the likes of Galileo, who used wine instead of mercury."
Streever's example of the year following the eruption of Mount Tambora ... in Indonesia in 1815 fixes the destructive nature of volcanic eruptions firmly in a reader's memory.
Volcanic dust in earth's atmosphere acts like a translucent shade on a window, blocking the sun's rays, he writes. Decreased warmth from the sun changes wind and current movements in the Northern Hemisphere....
"The laconic farmers of New England" referred to the year simply as "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death."....
The cold and resultant crop failures around the globe . made horses too expensive ... leading to the invention of what would become the bicycle.
Mary Shelley "was holed up in Lord Byron's lakeside retreat near Geneva in the summer of 1816." The weather, more than a year after Tamura's eruption, "kept Byron's guests indoors. . He challenged them to come up with ghost stories. Shelley came up with Frankenstein. ... The popular impression of the novel today is based on movies that share only a name and a monster with the book," but Streever tells readers that Shelley's novel "starts with letters from an Arctic explorer," who "spots a dogsled pulling a strange creature, the living thing mysteriously created by Dr. Frankenstein," who dies on the boat.
The creature ... "leaps through a cabin window, landing on an ice floe, and drifts off into
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Overview
From avalanches to glaciers, from seals to snowflakes, and from Shackleton's expedition to "The Year Without Summer," Bill Streever journeys through history, myth, geography, and ecology in a year-long search for cold--real, icy, 40-below cold. In July he finds it while taking a dip in a 35-degree Arctic swimming hole; in September while excavating our planet's ancient and not so ancient ice ages; and in October while exploring hibernation habits in animals, from humans to wood frogs to bears.A scientist whose passion for cold runs red hot, Streever is a wondrous guide: he conjures woolly mammoth carcasses and the ice-age Clovis tribe from melting ...