When Powell's asked me to be the guest blogger for this week, I immediately said "sure." (I say "sure" to a lot of things, often without thinking them through.) The attraction of blogs is that they're breezy, witty, and personal.
My book is about global warming, which is serious, depressing, and ??? by definition ??? beyond any one person's experience. When you write about global warming, you start to feel that a lot of what we all spend our time worrying (or blogging) about isn't what we should be worrying (or blogging) about at all. (Which isn't to say you stop worrying about it ??? or, I suppose, blogging.)
I first started thinking about global warming from the perspective of a reporter, rather than that of a mother or a gardener or a concerned citizen, about six years ago, when I picked up a book that had been sent to the offices of the New Yorker. The New Yorker receives hundreds of books every week ??? perhaps thousands, I don't think anyone keeps track ??? and a large proportion of these eventually find their way to what's called "the bench," which is exactly what the name suggests. Books on "the bench" are considered fair game for anyone walking by. The book that caught my attention was called The Two-Mile Time Machine by Richard Alley, and it explained what had been learned about the climate of the past from cores drilled out of the Greenland ice sheet. I called up Alley, who's a geologist at Penn State ??? this is one of the pleasures of being a reporter, when a book interests you, you can just ring up the author ??? and told him that I'd like to go on a Greenland ice-coring expedition myself. It turned out that the project Alley had been working on was finished, but he put me in touch with some Danes, who were drilling a core at a research station called North GRIP. In June, 2001, I boarded a cargo plane operated by the New York Air National Guard and flew to Kangerlussuaq, a defunct Air Force base on the west coast of Greenland. From Kangerlussuaq, I took a ski plane up to North GRIP.
North GRIP is situated in the very center of Greenland, on top of more than two miles of ice. (Hence Alley's title.) It is the most extraordinary place I have ever been, or, really, ever hope to go. In all directions there is nothing but white. Since North GRIP lies several degrees above the Arctic Circle and I was there in mid-June, the sun never set; it just circled crazily over head. Living in twenty-four hour sunlight is exhilarating, even mildly addictive. I don't think I slept five minutes while I was there.
Once you have spent some time on top of the Greenland ice sheet, the prospect that it could melt ??? a very real possibility given projections of warming for the coming century ??? becomes terrifying in whole new way. After I came home from North GRIP, I began to consider how I might convey the nature of this threat, though it would take me several more years ??? and another trip to Greenland ??? before I would figure out how.