The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age

Swiss professor Louis Agassiz (1807-73) spent decades arguing that his conception of an Ice Age was not madness. Geologist and master politician Charles Lyell (1797-1875) tried to reconcile his own observations with scientific principles that made an Ice Age impossible. Adventurer and poet Elisha Kent Kane (1820-57) was trapped at the top of Greenland for two winters and portrayed a harsh and frozen landscape that made the Ice Age credible. Bolles, a prolific and popular science writer, tells the tale.