A World Without Ice summary

Ever thought about what life without ice would be like? For starters, it’d mean no more ice hockey or drinks served “on the rocks.” But ice also has significance on a global scale, which means its absence would have a bigger impact than you might expect.

Ice has unique properties that make it a key player in our planet’s climate. As we know, ice is just plain old frozen water, or solid H2O in chemical terms. When most fluids solidify, they usually contract. But not water. When water forms ice, it expands in volume. Ice has a lower density than water as a result, which is what allows it to float without sinking! There you have the mechanics of the iceberg.

If you took a trip back in time to Europe or North America 20,000 years ago, there wouldn’t be much to see. Why? Because back then everything was covered with a layer of ice two miles thick! That’s right, around 120,000 years ago, Earth saw the beginnings of an ice age that would last 100,000 years. And that was our most recent ice age.

In fact, ice ages are a rather common event in Earth’s history. As many as twenty ice ages have taken place over the past 3 million years. But hold on: how do we know this?

Some 20,000 years ago, the most recent ice age reached its end. The ice began to melt, Earth began to warm again and, over the next 10,000 to 12,000 years, it reached an average surface temperature a little hotter than today’s. But how can we be sure that’s what really happened?

Well, there are several methods we can use to reconstruct historic climate patterns. The first entails investigating tree rings. Every year, a tree grows a little and adds a new ring of materials around its trunk. In years when conditions are great for growth (not too hot or cold, not too wet or dry), these rings are thicker. Conversely, these rings are thinner in times of drought.

Our planet’s climate is subject to natural fluctuations. In the past these occurred so gradually that one century tended to look a lot like the next. The same can no longer be said today, as it is widely acknowledged that rapid global warming is the result of human activity.

This is no surprise when we consider how drastically humans have altered the land they live in. Forests have been wiped out to make room for agricultural land and housing is built with the resulting timber. The logging and burning of forests releases the CO2 contained in living trees into the atmosphere.

Many of us tend to think that climate change is an abstract phenomenon, something that will happen far off in the future. Yet the opposite is true: climate change affects today’s ecology and economy in a big way.

Take glacial ice, for a start. Municipal systems and agriculture in the foothills and plains surrounding high mountains rely on melting glacial ice as their water source. This is the water that millions of inhabitants use to drink, flush away sewage and water crops.  

So the big question is: Can we do anything to prevent global warming, melting polar ice and flooded coastlines? Though many attempt to stay positive, the short answer is no.

Climate change is unavoidable. For one thing, the sheer amount of greenhouse gases that have already been pumped into the atmosphere will have lasting effects far into the future. Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, lingers in the atmosphere for more than 100 years. Even if no CO2 were to be emitted into the atmosphere starting today, Earth would still warm by about 1°F – enough to turn the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska into desert, for example.