"The Future of Ice": Embracing the cold, decrying its demise

A genre-defying mix of travel writing, scientific fact, poetry and outrage, "The Future of Ice" is Gretel Ehrlich's follow-up to her fascinating look at Greenland, "This Cold Heaven." Ehrlich describes her new book as a "six-month chronicle of living with cold: where I went looking for winter and the ways in which winter found me."

Ehrlich treks with a male friend through the glaciated mountains of the Southern Andes in January and spends a couple of weeks in May on a sea voyage through the rough waters of the Barents Sea to Spitzbergen. (It's worth noting that both journeys, while cold, are not winter-dark; they actually take place in summer months). In between and after the two long journeys that anchor the book, Ehrlich is in Wyoming. There, where she has a home and friends, she gives us snatches of daily life during months alternately snowless and snowbound, where ranchers worry that things don't seem right.

Her travels serve to point out the hard facts of global warming, buttressed by conversations with scientists. Glaciers both south and north are shrinking and disappearing and with them goes the ability of snow and ice to deflect the heat of the sun. As Earth absorbs solar heat, temperatures rise. More ice melts, ocean levels rise and species are extinguished. Eventually, all life will be in danger.

"Snow and ice are the earth's built-in air conditioner, crucial to the health of the planet," she writes. "Without winter's white mantle, earth will become a heat sponge, and only smoke from a volcano could shield us from incoming UV rays. As heat escalates, all our sources of fresh water — already in danger of being depleted — will disappear."

Although the book is fragmented in its structure, the language is poetic and full of grief and anger. As an exploration of what winter means, "The Future of Ice" may fall short, but as an elegy for lost glaciers, species, and perhaps the planet, the book could hardly be more timely or more powerful.

Barbara Sjoholm is the author of "The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O'Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea."