A Flawed but Riveting Saga on Ice

We take for granted so many facts of the natural world discovered in the last two centuries that we forget how recently, in relative time, some of those fundamental building blocks of nature were brought to light. Everybody now understands that from roughly 2 million to 11,000 years ago great glaciers covered the poles of the earth and extended far down into what are now the temperate zones. But until the mid-19th century no one knew, and only a few suspected, that such was the case.

In “The Ice Finders,” Edmund Blair Bolles tells the riveting story of three major players in the discovery of the Ice Age:

Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), the Swiss geologist who principally conceived the theory and later became a lionized professor at Harvard; Charles Lyell (1797-1875), the British geologist whom Bolles describes as a master politician among scientists, and who, after disbelieving, eventually supported Agassiz’s theory; and the most touching figure of all, Elisha Kent Kane (1820-1857), the upper-class Philadelphia poet and adventurer, whose published descriptions of the terrible two winters he spent trapped in his ship off the huge glaciers of Greenland provided to the public the vivid picture of the massive glaciers Agassiz postulated.

The story is inherently dramatic. Science was advancing on many fronts faster than the world had ever seen, and the principles of the Christian religion as they were then conceived--the literal truth of the Bible--were being undermined.

Bolles tells how early-19th-century geologists were mystified by the huge rocks they found in Europe that had clearly come from somewhere else. Still in thrall to the story of Noah, they began to imagine the rocks embedded in huge icebergs floating over Europe during various floods.

Bolles explains how Agassiz and other scientists gradually came to inspect the Alps to discover on the walls of the mountain valleys the straight incised lines and polished boulders made by the vast ancient glaciers.

By the late 1830s, they were satisfied of the existence of the Ice Age. It was slow going, though; science sometimes moves in fits and starts, and it did here as well.

It was not until Agassiz demonstrated that in Scotland, too, which, unlike the Alps, had no remaining glaciers, the same massive ice sheets had carved the mountains and the land.

The British geologist Lyell’s role is interesting, for he initially believed that the Ice Age was a scientific impossibility, yet after Agassiz showed him the evidence, he changed his mind, however slowly, and eventually came to support his Swiss colleague.

The Philadelphian Kane (the “poet” of Bolles’ subtitle, for Kane wrote some verse) worked independently from Agassiz, Lyell and other Europeans. His discovery of the glaciers of Greenland corroborated their theories, and his descriptions of their unique majesty are still enthralling. After seeing in 1854 the largest river of ice in the world, which he named for the German naturalist Humboldt, Kane wrote:

“Here was a plastic, moving, semisolid mass, obliterating life, swallowing rocks and islands, and ploughing its way with irresistible march through the crust of an investing sea.”

On the whole Bolles tells his story well. The conflicts between science and religion, personal enmities and the burning desire for fame, the awful hardships Kane and his crew suffered on their icebound journey are carefully laid out, but the book has some flaws a vigilant and caring editor could have fixed. Too often Bolles jumps in the middle of things, then has to backtrack to catch you up. Lazy contemporary slang intrudes on this more orderly 19th-century world, like “think-a-thon” for a serious inquiry about glaciers.

And, while some current nonfiction books have too much detail, this one could well have been a hundred pages longer. How exactly, for example, did Agassiz “land” a professorship at Harvard? The characters in this tale are so engaging we could well learn more about them here.

Nevertheless “The Ice Finders” is an engrossing if at times excessively breezy account of a fascinating period in the history of modern science.