Thin Ice by Mark Bowen - Essay Example

Also since Mark Bowen has a PhD from MIT and is no newcomer to science I was assured that the book would be reliable and interesting. In a smooth flowing narrative, Bowen, a mountain climber, a physicist and a science writer who has accompanied Thompson on several expeditions from the Andean Altiplano to Tibetan ice sheets, from the Alaskan Bona-Churchill glacier to Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya, describes drilling ice at high altitudes. In the process explains to us the science behind the steady rise in global temperature due to human activities.

The subtitle of this book, Unlocking the secrets of climate in the worlds highest mountains, briefly summarizes what this book is about. Bowen’s book is about the exploits of Lonnie Thompson, a professor. Thompson challenged the established beliefs on how climate change occurs and instead put forth his revolutionary lightweight-coring techniques that could draw ice cores. Bowen explains how carbon dioxide and water vapor by interacting with each other regulate earth’s thermostat. He also argues that scientific evidence conclusively shows that it is the use of fossil fuels that has accelerated global warming and predicts that soon the snows of Kilimanjaro will be no more.

Thin Ice has some exciting stories. It has stories of transporting the scientists and their drilling equipment to inaccessible places, of team members struggling with altitude sickness, of windstorms that destroy the solar panels which power their drill, of the crew trying to send ice core samples with a hot-air balloon, etc. The scientists camp for weeks at a time taking in “the brown earth and the blue sky and the white ice." (Mike Bowen, 2005) and these seeps into their skins so much that they begin to bond emotionally with the mountains.

Thompsons team that includes Bowen made a number of surprising additions to the climate theory and certain established views. One such surprise discovery was that when ice in the poles gets thick