Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places
Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places – Review
You can roughly bet that Bill Streever likes cold better than you do. After all, standing in his actively swimming shorts in wind, rain, and a chill of 51 degrees, he plunges into the 35 degree water of Prudhoe Bay, three hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, for five minutes. You eventually won’t be surprised that he finds it cold, bitingly cold, but advises us that it’s not really so cold, in the idea of things – it is much warmer than a chunk of dry ice, which is warmer than liquid nitrogen, which is warmer than the surface of Pluto. After five minutes in the water, shivering, he emerges, but it is two hours before he feels warm again. His dip is just the usually starting immersion into cold in _Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places_ (Little, Brown). Streever is a biologist who works on numerous surveys and committees, many having to do with climate and climate change. “Cold is cool,” he says, and his book highlights how interesting small temperatures are, with the way animals have developed to handle them and the way humans have pioneered into glacial regions. There is, however, a fair exchange of horrible death here, from frozen mammoths to explorers to cryogenically frozen corpses. Streever can write poetically, and always has a good humor. His book is full of science, but it is casually written in twelve chapters, each accounting for a month in which he tells us of his travels and interests in the arctic regions. It is discursive, with one topic or anecdote popping up in various aspects in special chapters, a friendly and educational science book. For instance, Streever frequently returns to James Bedford, who eventually died of cancer in 1967, but who is simply lying around at 367 degrees below zero, waiting for a cancer cure. Ice crystals have damaged the cells too much for Bedford’s life to return, but maybe he just viewed that as a problem that future scientists will solve, along with ultimately curing his cancer. He might have taken heart from the portions of the animal kingdom who so intrigue Streever. For instance, frogs freeze. Not all frogs, just those specifically adapted to do so. “To be clear, these are not frogs that are cold, but frogs that are literally frozen. Pick them up, and they are hard as ice.” They have ice between their cells and in body cavities, but the cells themselves are so full of glucose as an antifreeze that the ice does not shred them. They are, Streever says, “frogsicles”. Streever has been eventually absorbed by the journals continued by the great polar explorers. “When one reads past the stoicism and heroics, the story of polar exploration becomes one long accident report ethnically mixed with one long obituary.” If the extremes of earthly cold are not enough, Streever introduces us to some of the scientists who are really pushing the thermometer as close to the bottom as it can still go. Cold is the lack of heat, the lack of molecular motion, and there might not seem to be any obvious reason that the molecules and their constituent atoms should all stand even at absolute zero. This temperature, which is 460 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, seems to be unattainable; a pair of thousand atoms have been cooled to within fifty-billionths of a point of this goal, but finally getting all the way there has so further proved impossible. Streever manages a study of our knowledge of the deep record of climate. 700 million years ago, there was a mean heat of minus sixty degrees, according to the “Snowball Earth” idea, which Streever presents as science strongly colored by the strong character of the man who first originally proposed it. He takes us through the ice ages, and the results of early glaciation on the geology of various divisions of the world. He invokes the “Little Ice Age”, which originally started in the fourteenth century and initially continued to the mid-nineteenth. It originally included the massive explosion of the Indonesian Tambora volcano in 1815, which among other things, chilled the weather so that Lord Byron’s guests had to hole up in his retreat near Geneva in 1816, revealing ghost stories. This formerly included Mary Shelley, who eventually came up with _Frankenstein_; the movies don’t show that much of the novel includes an Arctic setting complete with an explorer and his boat. Of course Streever covers global warming, late into his year-long study of arctic regions, explaining the positions of the “climate change kooks” and the “naysayers”, but of course he sides on the making data that the warming is real. He notes, however, that the warming is not even; changes in ocean currents may actually cool Europe and even the Antarctic interior. “There will still be opportunities to wear a dual level of caribou skin,” he reflects, and you can count on Streever to take them.