Meltdown: The Earth Without Glaciers
Climate change is happening all around us, and one of the tell-tale signs is melting glaciers.
Daily the news is filled with stories of pieces of ice the size of continents breaking off of Antarctica or the North Pole now floating in the oceans. But does it really matter? Will melting glaciers so far away change our lives?
Absolutely! says Jorge Daniel Taillant, author of Meltdown: The Earth Without Glaciers. In his latest book, he takes us deep into the cryosphere, the Earth’s frozen environment, and picks apart why glacier melt will alter the way we live around the world.
From rising seas that will destroy property and flood millions of acres of coastal lands displacing hundreds of millions of people, to rising global temperatures due to changes in the reflectivity of the Earth because of decreased glacier surface area, to colossal water supply changes from glacier runoff reduction, glacier melt is altering our global ecosystems in ways that will drastically change our everyday lives.
“Taillant masterfully takes us on a journey through the profound changes our cryosphere is suffering from climate change and how melting glaciers that are vanishing around the world will not only destroy delicate ecosystems, from oceans to coastlines and from urban environments to forests but how they will radically change how we live on Earth in ways not yet imagined. His unique capacity to bring together media, science, politics, and society in understandable prose offers a powerful wake-up call to our deepening climate crisis.”
- Durwood Zaelke, IGSD President
Meltdown also takes delves into the little-known realm of the periglacial environment, a world of invisible glaciers creeping through the sub-terrain of our coldest mountain ranges. These massive enigmatic bodies of invisible ice that even glaciologists know little about, will survive beyond the life of visible glaciers and the initial impacts of climate change, but will they be enough to save humanity from its vanishing glacier ice?
Meltdown is an awakening to a new and altered world where one of our most obscure and but also most fascinating natural resources are going through colossal changes right before our eyes. We are literally witnessing the change of a geological era and melting glaciers are the first sign.
Available for purchase here.