Like the adventurer who circled an iceberg to see it on all sides, Mariana Gosnell, former Newsweek reporter and author of Zero Three Bravo, a book about flying a small plane around the United States, explores ice in all its complexity, grandeur, and significance.

More brittle than glass, at times stronger than steel, at other times flowing like molasses, ice covers 10 percent of the earth’s land and 7 percent of its oceans. In nature it is found in myriad forms, from the delicate needle ice that crunches underfoot in a winter meadow to the massive, centuries-old ice that forms the world’s glaciers. Scientists theorize that icy comets delivered to Earth the molecules needed to get life started, and ice ages have shaped much of the land as we know it.

Here is the whole world of ice, from the freezing of Pleasant Lake in New Hampshire to the breakup of a Vermont river at the onset of spring, from the frozen Antarctic landscape that emperor penguins inhabit to the cold, watery route bowhead whales take between Arctic ice floes. Mariana Gosnell writes about frostbite and about the recently discovered 5,000-year-old body of a man preserved in an Alpine glacier. She discusses the work of scientists who extract cylinders of Greenland ice to study the history of the earth’s climate and try to predict its future. She examines ice in plants, icebergs, icicles, and hail; sea ice and permafrost; ice on Mars and in the rings of Saturn; and several new forms of ice developed in labs. She writes of the many uses humans make of ice, including ice-skating, ice fishing, iceboating, and ice climbing; building ice roads and seeding clouds; making ice castles, ice cubes, and iced desserts.

Ice is a sparkling illumination of the natural phenomenon whose ebbs and flows over time have helped form the world we live in. It is a pleasure to read, and important to read—for its natural science and revelations about ice’s influence on our everyday lives, and for what it has to tell us about our environment today and in the future.

Gosnell explores ice from a rather more aesthetic and cultural than scientific point of view, but certainly manages to hold her own in descriptions of how ice forms and what water can do as a solid; she differs with chemists and physicists in that she is also curious bout why perfectly good water would decide to do such a thing. In 36 cascading chapters she explores the ice of lakes, rivers, streams, mountains, and glaciers, its effect on animals, plants, and humans, what it does on the sea and what it does in space, how it creates its own ages and its own places to hide in a lake in the woods. Gosnell catches the beauty of an entity that is transformed and transforms while retaining an identity and perhaps even a few mysteries which perhaps it knows to keep to itself.
Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Gosnell explores ice from a rather more aesthetic and cultural than scientific point of view, but certainly manages to hold her own in descriptions of how ice forms and what water can do as a solid; she differs with chemists and physicists in that she is also curious bout why perfectly good water would decide to do such a thing. In 36 cascading chapters she explores the ice of lakes, rivers, streams, mountains, and glaciers, its effect on animals, plants, and humans, what it does on the sea and what it does in space, how it creates its own ages and its own places to hide in a lake in the woods. Gosnell catches the beauty of an entity that is transformed and transforms while retaining an identity and perhaps even a few mysteries which perhaps it knows to keep to itself. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

“An enchanting account of the solid phase of that most vital of all earthy compounds: water. ICE took me to novel, frigid terrains....A roving intellectual journey by an insatiably curious mind, [it] is as orderly as a crystal lattice.”

David G. Campbell, author of The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica

“Former Newsweek reporter Gosnell is an attentive and patient observer who traveled around the globe for this compendium of the human and natural history of ice....She conducts a bright, curious, and omnidirectional tour that will entrance nature readers.”

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Mariana Gosnell was born and grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University with a major in fine art. She worked for many years at Newsweek, where she reported on medicine and science. She is the author of a previous book, Zero Three Bravo: Solo Across America in a Small Plane, and her articles appear in many magazines including Smithsonian and National Wildlife. She lives in New York City and summers at Lake of the Woods in Canada.