[Tanada]

Picked this one up over the weekend, it is the story of a mountaineer author who was hired to do a magazine piece on mountaintop ice core drilling and ended up becoming friends with the climatologists and glaciologists on the project. Over the years from 1997 to 2005 he recorded their work at many locations world wide and has now produced a very well written book explaining what they found from the 1960's to 2005 in terms any middle school level reader can comprehend.

Two facts leapt out at me reading it, the WAIS is only 25,000 years old and the vast majority of mountain glaciers will be gone by 2030.

Knowing that the WAIS is so young means it is also very unstable, it only formed in the harshest cold snap right before the Great Melting which lead to the Holocene conditions we are now in. Odds are good that it has collapsed and reformed many times during the ice age cycles from 3 Mybp.

Highly recommended reading, informative and entertaining at the same time.