cover image Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land

Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land

James McClintock. Palgrave Macmillan, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-0-230-11245-2

The Endowed Professor of polar and marine biology at the University of Alabama–Birmingham, McClintock distills 28 years of research and 13 field expeditions to the seventh continent in his first book of popular science: an eminently readable, reasonable call to arms regarding the dangers of climate change to both the fragile Antarctic ecosystem and the planet as a whole. Each chapter covers a different angle of the problem, from the deleterious effects of increasing ocean acidification to invasions of the Antarctic Shelf by king crabs spurred by warming waters, as McClintock steadily and carefully builds his case for Antarctica as “the earth’s most well-suited natural laboratory” in which to study the impacts of climate change. Though the lab results can be scary, his kinetic, awestruck descriptions of “the Ice” paint breathtaking pictures, such as when he is “flying by helicopter down the gut-dropping length of the Taylor Dry Valley and erupting out of its mouth over the deep-blue waters set against the sparkling white expanse of McMurdo Sound’s ice edge.” Charming and anecdote-filled, the book’s only failing is that McClintock occasionally gets lost in thickets of scientific jargon, but like your favorite undergraduate science professor, he finds a way to make the most difficult, esoteric concepts accessible to the layperson. Photos. Agent: Katherine Flynn, the Kneerim and Williams Agency. (Sept.)