Product Description

Richard Alley, one of the world's leading climate researchers, tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. In the 1990s he and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. Here Alley offers the first popular account of the wildly fluctuating climate that characterized most of prehistory--long deep freezes alternating briefly with mild conditions--and explains that we humans have experienced an unusually temperate climate. But, he warns, our comfortable environment could come to an end in a matter of years.

The Two-Mile Time Machine begins with the story behind the extensive research in Greenland in the early 1990s, when scientists were beginning to discover ancient ice as an archive of critical information about the climate. Drilling down two miles into the ice, they found atmospheric chemicals and dust that enabled them to construct a record of such phenomena as wind patterns and precipitation over the past 110,000 years. The record suggests that "switches" as well as "dials" control the earth's climate, affecting, for example, hot ocean currents that today enable roses to grow in Europe farther north than polar bears grow in Canada. Throughout most of history, these currents switched on and off repeatedly (due partly to collapsing ice sheets), throwing much of the world from hot to icy and back again in as little as a few years.

Alley explains the discovery process in terms the general reader can understand, while laying out the issues that require further study: What are the mechanisms that turn these dials and flip these switches? Is the earth due for another drastic change, one that will reconfigure coastlines or send certain regions into severe drought? Will global warming combine with natural variations in Earth's orbit to flip the North Atlantic switch again? Predicting the long-term climate is one of the greatest challenges facing scientists in the twenty-first century, and Alley tells us what we need to know in order to understand and perhaps overcome climate changes in the future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #166317 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Thomas Stocker, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
The book is an excellent messenger of scientific endeavor and the enrichment this brings to society.

Review
Although not all scientists will agree with Alley's conclusions, [this] engaging book--a brilliant combination of scientific thriller, memoir and environmental science--provides instructive glimpses into our climatic past and global future . . .
(Publisher's Weekly )

Alley's . . . striking finding is that the earth's climate has always been wildly variable and subject to dramatic swings--except during the past 10,000 years. So the period during which humankind has established itself across the globe and made the transition from grubby bands of hunter-gatherers to the dubious majesty of global capitalism corresponds exactly to a freakishly stable period in the earth's climate.
(Angus Clarke The Times of London )

With a highly readable style designed to capture and stimulate the imagination of his students, Alley explains some of the complexities of Earth system science with a minimum of jargon. This book is not just for students: it will be readily accessible to a wide audience that should be aware of its contents.
(David Peel New Scientist )

[A] provocative little book . . . a compelling tale of climate sleuthing . . .[Alley] is authoritative without being dogmatic, concerned without being alarmist.
(Robert C. Cowen Christian Science Monitor )

A fascinating journey into the geologic past and the history of the Earth's climate . . . Alley ends his entertaining book by polishing his crystal ball, envisioning what the future climate will be, and what we might do about it.
(J.A. Rial American Scientist )

A superlative account of a complex topic . . . It is refreshingly straightforward to read, often humorous, yet still deadly serious, complete with anecdotes and understandable explanations of complex processes.
(Choice )

Books in which scientists write about their professional experience and describe in lay terms the stuff that makes them excited about science rarely disappoint. Richard Alley's The Two Mile Time Machine is no exception. It describes a fascinating journey into the geologic past and the history of the Earth's climate. . . . Alley ends his entertaining book by polishing his crystal ball, envisioning what the future climate will be, and what we might do about it.
(J.A. Rial American Scientist )

[A] superb book. . . . Alley demonstrates that the scientific understanding of climate is both a lot more complex, and a lot simpler, than public perceptions might indicate. . . .The Two-Mile Time Machine restores some of the joy of discovery that has always been present in scientific work, but is often lost amidst today's furious research pace and compressed news cycles.
(Cathering H. Crouch Books and Culture )

A fascinating first-hand story. . . . [A]n engaging narrative about the processes of obtaining, analyzing, and interpreting the ice cores. . . . Scientists, students, and the general public all need to know the present state of our incomplete understanding of the global climate system. This book provides an excellent foundation
(Al Bartlett American Journal of Physics )

It is . . . refreshing to read a book that tells us in easy words, but with sufficient depth, how scientists have obtained the information about past climate change that is the basis for worries about the future. Richard Alley is a world authority in the science of ice cores and climate, and his book fills the large gap between technical and scholarly words for students of climate science and the short articles about these topics that are often found in the popular science magazines. The book addresses the interested layperson; following the story does not require special scientific knowledge. [It] is an excellent messenger of scientific endeavor and the enrichment this brings to society.
(Thomas Stocker Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society )

Review
The Two-Mile Time Machine takes a story that has been much discussed in the press and revitalizes it with the author's infectious enthusiasm and with background information on the history of ice core drilling. It provides an excellent survey for the general reader and those interested in the history of scientific exploration and issues related to science and society.
(Thomas J. Crowley, Texas A & M University )

Customer Reviews

Not like the cubes in your fridge
Alley joins the growing number of field scientists relating their experiences and the research performed by them. In his case the field is the top of the Greenland Ice Cap. The research is the study of ice patterns stretching back over 100 000 years. What do these patterns tell us? Need we care? He explains detail with clarity and detail how the research is done, and describes what has been revealed by it. What those finds tells us of the past, present and might mean in the future become the remainder of the book. One thing stands out vividly - climate not only varies more than we believe, it changes far more rapidly than we expected.

The Greenland Ice Cap bears an astonishingly detailed record of environmental events. Far more than simply packed snow, this massive archive keeps information about distant volcanic events, how much salt is in the sea water and what kind of winds played over the Earth's surface. Even conditions in distant Asia are recorded here in the dust layered within the ice. There are records of long periods of cold and announcements about continental drifting. Alley explains all the elements that must be examined in the layered ice, how they came about and why they occurred. Earth's solar orbit, its tilting angle to the sun, and the slow precessional rotation of the poles. All these motions are further complicated by oceanic currents, wind patterns and humidity levels. Alley describes tracking some of the variations as "following a roller-coaster with a man bouncing on a bungee cord while spinning a yo-yo". It's a dizzying picture and he's quick to point out that many points remain unexplained.

Is this an issue that should concern us? Human history from the onset of agriculture has been a period of unusual stability. The future, Alley tells us, is highly uncertain. The only certainty is that climate will change - it must. Global warming is a fact, not a supposition, he asserts. One result of it will be the addition of fresh water into the "conveyor belt" of oceanic water exchange. The North Atlantic is the key site. Interruption of that exchange by extra meltwater from North America will intrude - chilling northern Europe. Human populations will be affected differently in various places. There will be winners and losers in this situation, but the losers will certainly outnumber the winners. How severe will the changes be? "I don't know". How fast will the changes come about? "I don't know". His lack of knowledge doesn't stem from lack of effort. He reminds us that the information gleaned from Greenland is still new. There's much to learn and do. He calls to us: "Send us your brightest students to help, and cheer them on!". A good piece of advice, but not one likely to be taken by a people choosing business instead of science. And that, if Alley's use of "English" measurements and reversed diagrams, will be limited to those comfortable with such practices. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

An excellent book that delivers quite a few surprises.
So you thought that Global Warming was all about warming did you? Wrong! You thought that John Prescott wading through homes in Yorkshire was a nasty sign of what could happen to you as the world warms up? Well, yes, pretty nasty but it could even get worse!

The Two Mile Machine is an examination of the Greenland ice core and the book now stands at the forefront of climate research. The ice reveals that our climate is far more volatile that we ever imagined. Extreme cooling and extreme warming has been part and parcel of the earth's climate for millions of years but the really surprising result of this research is that these coolings and warmings can be extrememly rapid. They can take place in even less than a decade.

The book shows that one of the main keys to this rapid change in the climate is the Atlantic ocean. Not to spoil the plot but, in brief, as the world gets warmer the warm water flowing up from the tropics is halted because fresh melted water from the ice sheets stop what is known as 'the conveyor'. The author explains terminology very well for the non-expert and uses very appropriate examples from everyday life. This is a book for the non-scientist.

The author explains very carefully that the surprising result of Global Warming, however caused, could be a drastic change in the climate of the Northern Hemisphere with a mini or major cooling down.

This book is not science fiction but new science fact and suddenly delivers a very different perspective to the current enviromental debate.

So if you thought that the prospect of John Prescott wading through your house was bad enough, what about a polar bear or two?

Well worth a read!

The Two Mile Time-Machine
At a time when there is a great deal of media interest in the possibility of abrupt climate change it is refreshing to come across an informative book that is accessible to the non-specialist. It makes excellent background reading based on solid scientific evidence and contains enough technical information to interest anyone who wants to study the subject in more depth.