Gabrielle WalkerKirja-arvosteluja

Very engaging.

Rating of 2.5. An O.K. book about one of the really major topics in geology today.
Could have been a stronger book, if the editor and author had used well thought out and
drawn illustrations.

I became fan of the author when I read her book[b:An Ocean Of Air: A Natural History Of The Atmosphere|1013145|An Ocean Of Air A Natural History Of The Atmosphere|Gabrielle Walker|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1356130470s/1013145.jpg|999269]. It was mix of history and science which made a fascinating read. This book also follows a very similar pattern but with one difference. In this book author not only brings out the challenges, adventure,history and importance of research, she also brings out the character of people who choose to spend time in there.

Every researcher she meets, they tell her about the different aspect of living isolated life on the continent and how it can be bearing sometime on the mind. That human touch to the story makes it a real read than dry facts about the continent.

There is fair bit of feminism rants particularly in the beginning of the book and mostly it's justified. But some places, it starts getting tiresome and i feel it was only dull parts of the book.

Overall it's a fantastic book. Many of us look at the sky for wonder and awe. But sometimes we forget the greatest mystery of our planet is under our feet covered in ice.

Excellent overview of the continent, from the earliest explorers to the latest cutting edge science, lots of personal observations also. There's a timeline at the end that repeats the main points in chronological order, which was a good way to summarize. No preaching but no holding back either. A very well balanced book, recommended for anyone interested in the subject, She references many other books and websites for further exploration, First rate.

There is some scary stuff in here about global warming, and it effects on the planet and the human race.

Another excellent science book by Walker

Walker is one of the better science writers out there at the moment.

She has a passion for the polar regions, and writes about Antarctica with clarity and measured prose. She clearly explains how the effect of climate change is starting to have a noticeable effect at the South Pole. She describes the characters that inhabit the stations, who vary from the reclusive scientist to the people normally on the fringes of society.

Bang up to date, well worth a read.

I love non-fiction books that give a new perspective on the things that surround us and that we often don’t think much of at all. In this case, I don’t think I will ever see air the same way again. In fact, if it had been up to me I would have titled it “The Sky Above Us” because it had a similar impact on how I saw the atmosphere as “The Sea Around Us” had on how I saw the ocean.

The book compares our atmosphere to an ocean, and based on scale alone (which I had never really thought of) the comparison is apt – Earth’s atmosphere weighs 3,750,000,000,000,000 tons. And like the oceans, its activity is an immense driver of climate patterns and the life they support; for one thing, the wind patterns in the troposphere are the reason the world’s major deserts are located 30 degrees north and thirty degrees south of the equator (examples include Sahara and the Gobi Deserts in the northern hemisphere and the Atacama and the Australian outback in the southern hemisphere), even though the equator is hotter. And yet, “we give our own overlying air-ocean so little respect that we even describe anything that’s full of air as being “empty.” (page 5).

And then there is the difference between looking up at the sky versus looking down at the sky. Almost everyone has looked up, and seen the vast expanse of blue, looking surprisingly solid and perhaps populated with some fluffy or wispy clouds. But only a few people have journeyed to the edge of space, and have seen something radically different:

“Where Earth’s surface curved away from the horizon, a glowing blue halo stood out against the blackness of space. This glow was the atmosphere, the single greatest gift our planet possesses…That thin blue line has transformed our planet from a barren lump of rock into a world full of life. And it is the only shield that stands between vulnerable earthlings and the deadly environment of space.”

Astronauts have often described it as one of the things that makes Earth look not only incredibly beautiful but also incredibly fragile.

This book is worth it for the prologue alone, which describes how Joe Kittinger used a helium-filled balloon to ascend over twenty miles above Earth, and then jumped (in appropriate survival gear). He was the first to do it; two similar jumps by others followed, the most recent in 2012. The prologue vividly described his descent through the various layers of the atmosphere that he fell through, explained some of the activity further above him (he did not ascend very far into the ionosphere because it is crackling with electrical activity), and effectively set the stage for the rest of the book. One passage I particularly enjoyed was:

“Kittinger was tumbling through another of our world's vital protective shields – the ozone layer. Ozone is miraculous stuff…High aloft it is both vigilant and resilient. Any invisible UV rays that had slipped through the ionosphere were being soaked up by a diffuse cloud of invisible gas. Split asunder by ultraviolet rays, the ozone molecules around Kittinger were calmly reforming. Like the burning bush encountered by Moses, they are constantly ablaze but never consumed.”

A subsequent chapter elaborated on the ozone layer and what it does for us, and I gained a new appreciation for it:

“Our ozone layer protects us so comfortably and effectively that we could easily never know the dangers that lie just a few miles above us. It works like a minefield: Whenever an ozone molecule is touched by an ultraviolet ray, it explodes, firing off one of its three oxygen atoms. But this is a minefield that reforms itself constantly. The shrapnel from the explosion – a stray oxygen atom and an ordinary oxygen molecule – recombine. And when they do the ozone is born again.” (page 131).

Also, this may be the first time I have heard ozone described as “beautiful” (it is a striking shade of blue). I will add that I was in grade school when the hole in the ozone layer exploded into the national conscience and CFCs became a household term. Needless to say, a great deal went over my head at the time, so it was good to have this description to fill in the gaps. A discussion of how CFCs came to be was very interesting – they were originally developed by a company conscientiously attempting to improve the safety of the refrigerators it produced in an age before government prodding. Because the book was published in 2007, I will add that a 2016 study published in Nature showed that the 1993 global ban on CFCs has been effective and the hole in the ozone layer has gradually begun to shrink and the layer itself is already slightly thicker.

Humans are not the only ones to have dramatically affected the composition of the atmosphere – plants have had – and continue to have – a huge impact when it comes to carbon dioxide: “The scale of this activity [plant-based photosynthesis] is staggering. Every year, green plants convert carbon dioxide into 100,000 million tons of plant material. To do this, plants use up 300 trillion calories of energy from the sun, which is thirty times the energy consumption of all the machines on Earth.” (page 68). The prologue also helped provide a new perspective on plant life. Kittinger landed in the desert of New Mexico, surrounded by yuccas and sagebrush. But where other people saw a dry desert and small, scrubby, and generally unattractive plants, he saw an almost impossibly lush landscape, explaining that, “fifteen minutes before I’d been on the edge of space, and now, to me, I was in the Garden of Eden.”

The book also touched on Earth’s magnetic field, which helps protect our atmosphere from the sun. Although it was not presented this way in the book, I found it helpful to think of the sun as a giant continuously detonating thermonuclear bomb throwing out just about every form of radiation on the spectrum. This radiation includes the solar wind, a stream of high-energy charged particles travelling over a million miles per hour. Earth’s intrinsic magnetic field extends over ten thousand miles into space and forces the solar wind and other blasts of electromagnetic radiation to part around it. Anything that does manage to get past the magnetic field still has the exosphere, ionosphere, and ozone layer to contend with. The result?

“I can scarcely believe that air too thin for me to breathe is yet strong enough to fend off everything that space can throw at us.

Yet it is. In October 2003, a series of explosions rocked the outer surface of the sun. A massive flare flash-fried Earth with X-rays equivalent to five thousand suns. A slingshot of plasma barreled toward us at two million miles an hour. The radioactivity it contained was the equivalent…of taking every nuclear warhead that has ever been made – not exploded, mark you, but made – and detonating them all at once.

And yet nobody on Earth felt a thing…The most massive solar flare since records began and one of the biggest radioactive maelstroms in history together met a far more formidable foe. They each arrived, and then, one by one they simply bounced off…thin air.” (page 235).

Highly recommended.

Interesting, for the more part. Probably a little too long and very repetitive.

Walker goes on and on about how exclusive Antarctica is... so what's she doing there?

A unique approach to a fascinating geographical and anthropological topic that is at once unfathomable yet alluring. Not limiting herself to any singular aspect of the cultural enigma that is Antarctica, Walker considers the continent from the perspectives of an anthropologist, biologist, geographer, climatologist, historian, and astronomer, among others. Rife with striking imagery of the unique wildlife and stark landscapes, Walker’s intimate experience with Antarctica is moving. This expansive yet accessible text offers a glimpse into the significance of this elusive continent in terms of the science it is home to and the key it holds to determining the future of our planet.

I had this book on my to-read shelf for years, after I read about another book by the same author. The other book is on my to-read shelf, too, but I am now not sure I want to start it - ever...

It's not that I hated the book but I just got bored with about a third way in. I am not a geologist and have no special interest in the details of how a theory was attempted, then disproved, then proved again over time - had hoped the story would be about the phenomenon of "snowball earth" rather than the personal life stories of the geologists involved in proving and disproving different theories in connection with snowball earth. Also the tone of the book grated on me - every story seemed to be told with overly dramatic effect - like a bad TV documentary.

Read on Kindle. This is a very readable and interesting book. It is tragic and traumatic; yes Antarctica is a huge place and much is little-touched, but it is melting and major changes are happening. Not just temperature but currents & rain. The ecology and geography is amazing. The history and the desert is fascinating and it is incredible that there is so much known about it -- that they can learn so much from what is left behind in the ice. The author went everywhere that she could and reported clearly on the scientific experiments & the culture of the residents. I definitely recommend it.½

Traverses the entire continent discussing the explorers of the heroic age, past and current scientific research operations, the cultural differences between each base, and introduces the reader to the machinery that allows the frozen continent to be habitable, however sparsely. All while capturing the profound awe felt by those few bastards lucky enough to have set foot on the ice. It's all vastly fascinating. I want soooo badly to spend a winter at the south pole, it sounds cleansingly brutal.

"I watched the sky a long time, concluding that such beauty was reserved for distant, dangerous places, and that nature has good reason for exacting her own personal sacrifices from those determined to witness them." (Admiral Richard Byrd)

Superb. Walker's writing style is very easy and fun to read. Wonderful anecdotes and very informative.

This book presents fascinating insights into a continent most of us will never get to visit. The author presents the land through the eyes of those who love it best: its researchers. If you weren't hankering for a big adventure before you read this book, you will be before you're done.

Very interesting. Easy informative reading with interesting personal experiences. The book includes some history but most of of current scientific endeavors and the effort involved in study and survival. The last chapter was very interesting talking about the land and water beneath the ice sheets.Pressure of ice causes water to "fall" uphill. Too much evolution included in writing.

Gabrielle Walker, a British scientist with a Ph.D. in chemistry, has captured the wonderful, almost other worldly quality of the southernmost part of our planet in Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent. Penguins are Antarctica's cute cliche and I love them as much as anyone but there are many other fascinating creatures of Antarctica that Walker includes in her book, among them giant single-celled organisms that survive in the Antarctic Sea by eating multi-celled animals much larger than themselves, cyanobacteria that somehow make their homes inside rocks, and the idiosyncratic research scientists and support people from countries around the world who have chosen to live in a frozen desert that has only one day per year, with six months of sunlight followed by six months of darkness.

Walker spent a lot of time in Antarctica herself visiting its numerous research stations, including a joint French and Italian outpost where scientists drilled into ice so old and deep that the cores they extracted reveal information about what the Earth's atmosphere and climate were like before the existence of our species. Because she traveled to facilities run by various countries she is able to report that the Italians have the most fashionable cold weather apparel, the French serve the best meals complete with wine, the Russians have a beautiful if incongruous domed Eastern Orthodox church to worship in, the Argentinians have schools and other child-friendly facilities because they encourage families to settle there, and the British are only beginning to catch up to the Americans in terms of the percentage of females on site.

The unique features of Antarctica make it appealing to scientists of just about any field, from biology and climate change to astronomy and space exploration. Since their communities are small and insular, people tend to mix so that a carpenter, an astrophysicist, a cook and an administrator might all sit down to eat together. With a writing style as engaging as the best fiction, Walker makes reading about their lives and challenges just as interesting as learning about the science they do.

If you've seen Werner Herzog's wonderful documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, this book by Gabrielle Walker will be especially satisfying because it fill in details about the continent and its inhabitants that the film couldn't cover.

A nice overview of the history of the science of the atmosphere. The book is well-written, and covers the personalities and the discoveries well, and mostly links them together pretty well. Not very technical, but gets across the physical and chemical concepts pretty well.

Era il 1960 quando Joseph Kittinger, capitano dell'aeronautica, si lanciò da 32.000 metri in caduta libera e sopravvisse. Questo ed altri misteri dell'atmosfera sono ricostruiti per dimostrare che l'uomo vive solo grazie all'aria.

This is an excellent, no-nonsense book with the facts about how the world is changing right now, and what we can expect in the future. It is not about doomsday scenarios but makes the case that we do have to act now, and that all of us can play a part ourselves and pressure our governments for sensible solutions. The really dire effects are unfortunately going to be left for our grandchildren to cope with if we continue business as usual. A very practical book that everyone should read, so they can sort through the hype and the headlines.