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Book review: ‘Lost Antarctica,’ ‘River Notes’ and ‘Apocalyptic Planet’

By Juliet Eilperin,November 09, 2012

Scrutinizing the state of the planet is not for the faint of heart. For the scientists and writers who spend their days examining the changes taking place across the globe, relating recent developments can be a dark business. Glaciers are melting; rivers are running dry; temperatures are rising; and each new natural disaster, such as the massive Hurricane Sandy, reminds us of our precarious existence. But undeterred, these men and women continue to provide their accounts, often in the hopes of altering what appears to be a fairly grim trajectory.

Three recent books — one depicting Antarctica, another the mighty Colorado River and a third several of the most extreme environments on Earth — do this with varying degrees of success. But all of them give readers a close-up view of some the most startling shifts underway and what these mean for us and the natural world.

James McClintock has spent his professional life studying the South Pole from the unlikely perch of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In “Lost Antarctica,” he chronicles how radically the remote continent has changed since he first journeyed there in the early 1980s. During 13 research expeditions to Antarctica, McClintock has experienced fierce westerly winds nicknamed for their speeds (“the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, and the Screaming Sixties”), watched icebergs calve, or break off, from glaciers, and charted the condition of copepods, the tiny crustaceans that help form the base of the Antarctic food chain.

In painstaking detail, McClintock describes how climate change has helped transform Antarctica over the past three decades. When he started working at Palmer Station, he recalls, about once a week he “would be startled by a loud, thundering crash” signaling that an iceberg had calved from a glacier. “Now . . . the calving events have become so routine that my colleagues and I in the BioLab don’t even bother to move from our desks when we hear the glacier roar. Sometimes, three or four calvings happen in a single day.”

Apparently lured by warming temperatures, spiny king crabs are marching away from the deepest part of the sea toward land, something that “hadn’t happened for millions of years.” Adelie penguins must spend more energy traveling farther in search of food as pack ice lining the shore retreats, and they now face new predators, such as invasive elephant seals.

McClintock’s writing is dense and clunky at times, and several passages are too personal or too laden with scientific jargon to interest a general reader. But in the end, his book poses powerful questions. Looking out from near the summit of Amsler Island, he asks, “What sort of a world, I wonder, will future generations of Antarctic scientists find when they come to this remarkable place?”

In “River Notes,”Wade Davis tackles another vast, iconic landscape and explores some of the same environmental questions as McClintock. Drawing upon a 2006 whitewater-rafting expedition he took down the Colorado River with his daughter and some close friends, Davis examines how Americans have disrupted one of the country’s greatest natural resources and undermined a vital ecosystem in the process.

Often lyrically, Davis bemoans the state of a river that has been hemmed in so that cities including Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Tucson and Phoenix can switch on their lights and have their taps flow. “For the entire American Southwest the Colorado is indeed the river of life, which makes it all the more tragic and ironic that by the time it reaches its final destination, it has been reduced to a shadow upon the sand, its delta dry and deserted, its flow a toxic trickle seeping into the sea.”

He does a good job of showing how we are all connected to this river, whether we recognize it or not: For example, the Colorado provides the water that allows arid Yuma, Ariz., to produce 95 percent of the North American winter lettuce crop.

While Davis is passionate about the river, the book’s strength lies in how it captures the men and women who came upon it decades and even centuries earlier. John Wesley Powell, whom Davis describes as “the bravest of all the river boatmen,” risked his life while navigating it. The Anasazi constructed an elaborate civilization with the river’s help, only to see it collapse in the face of drought. The Mormons established their society on the basis of the Colorado, too, and Davis suggests that the Mormon Church’s control over water rights helped solidify its power: “Access to water, without which a farming family could not survive, implied fidelity and obedience to doctrine and dogma.”