When Neil Shubin was a young biologist, he got his start looking for fossils in the poles, where now frozen wastelands were once jungles teeming with life. Doing science at the poles is uniquely challenging and physically demanding, sometimes to the point of being life-threatening. Here, Neil Shubin remembers and records his and others’ forays into the Artic and Antartic regions, where amid savage winds and persistent gloom scientists seek to advance our knowledge about Earth’s past, present, and future. A mix of memoir, history, and science, Ends of the Earth is an interesting frozen sundae of science topics: hydrology, geology, oceanography, and climatology which could have got even more varied had it mentioned the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica.

Shubin’s other works have been tightly focused, but this one is more loose as we bound back and forth between the two poles and the topics between them. There’s a lot covered here: Shubin’s memoirs from his own polar visits, where he learned how to survive amid the brutal cold and offers tips for aspiring Shackletons; the history of Antarica, Greenland, and the Artic’s exploration; reviews of how glaciation was discovered to work, and how glaciers have shaped the landscape; and ruminations on what the shrinking of the ice caps holds for us, past and present. There’s also a bit of Artic politics, since the north pole is ringed with nations, some of whom have missiles pointed at each other constantly. I was amused to learn of a dispute between Canada and Denmark over a lifeless rock called Hans Island: evidently they would take turns planting their respective flags and leaving a bottle of whisky or schnapps to make good the claim. I find Antartica particularly fascinating given its varied landscapes, but despite liking Shubin and enjoying the book well enough, it never pulled me in the way I expected.

Related:
The Ice at the End of the World, John Gertner