The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age by Edmund Blair Bolles, COUNTERPOINT, $24, 255 pages.




The News & Observer


March 26, 2000

Giving the Ice Age the cold shoulder


By Phillip Manning

Behind the orderly progress of science lies a bruising political process in which scientists battle one another to get their ideas accepted. This is because most scientists have a vested interest in some big idea about how the universe works. If, for example, you have devoted your career to showing how the sun moves around the Earth, you would not embrace a new theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. In fact, because it would invalidate your life's work, you would fight the new idea tooth and nail. And because scientists' reputations are based on their discoveries, the theory's proponent would fight just as hard to get it accepted - and be credited with that discovery.

In "The Ice Finders," Edmund Bolles, the author of numerous books, tells the fascinating story of a big idea that is common knowledge today but that was hotly contested 150 years ago: The Ice Age. The story begins in the 1830s, when the young and ambitious geologist Louis Agassiz moved from Paris back to his native Switzerland and began studying the small glaciers of the Alps. He knew that as glaciers moved, they pushed moraines (piles of stones and rubble) in front of them and carried boulders on top. He noticed that they scratched and polished the rock beneath them. He began to associate these observations with three previously unconnected facts. First, moraines were scattered throughout Europe, even in deep valleys, far from any glaciers. Second, boulders from Scandinavia littered the German plains. And, finally, polished, scratched rocks could be found in Scotland, where no glaciers existed.

Agassiz then took a tremendous leap. He said these phenomena could be explained if one accepted the fantastic notion that a huge sheet of ice once extended from the North Pole to the Mediterranean Sea. Some scientists accepted that the motion of glaciers could explain the geological phenomena, but they found the concept of a super glacier massive enough to do it unbelievable. Agassiz's chief nemesis was the 19th century's most influential and politically savvy geologist, Scotsman Charles Lyell. Lyell believed that the Earth was shaped by the forces we see around us today. His "Principles of Geology" - which was one of the few books that Charles Darwin took with him on the HMS Beagle - suggested that earthquakes, floods and icebergs might account for these phenomena. He did not even mention glaciers because those in Europe were small and uncommon.

Agassiz presented his Ice Age theory at the 1837 meeting of the Swiss Society of Natural Sciences. It was the kind of gathering that is all too familiar to working scientists, albeit a bit more ill-mannered. Agassiz recited his facts, then concluded: "I have no doubts that the phenomena attributed to great diluvial currents have been produced by ice." The audience, most of whom were Lyell's followers, scoffed at Agassiz's theory. "It turned so vehement," Bolles writes, "that some observers feared the introduction of fisticuffs."

Lyell and his disciples had too much invested in a geology that excluded glaciers to accept the facts marshaled by Agassiz. They believed that all geological phenomena could be explained by events they could observe, and the concept of big ice, of immense glaciers that dwarfed those of present-day Europe, was too much for these men of science to swallow. Their reaction to Agassiz's theory isn't surprising: It required a great conceptual leap to imagine that the continent on which they lived so comfortably was once was covered by a gigantic sheet of ice. The ability to make such leaps is a characteristic of genius, and like those scientists who scoffed at Agassiz, few of us have it. Agassiz left the meeting a resentful but wiser man. He needed something besides facts to convince the scientific world of the rightness of his ideas. That something came several years later from an unlikely source, an American explorer with a poetic bent named Elisha Kent Kane.

In 1853, Kane sailed north from Newfoundland for Greenland, searching for an earlier Arctic expedition that had failed to return. Unfortunately, Kane was inexperienced about the far North. His ship became locked in ice off the vast and largely unexplored Greenland coast, and his party spent two terrible winters there before Kane and a few other survivors made it back to the United States. With them came Kane's journals and their descriptions of big ice.

Much of Greenland, he wrote, was covered with a sheet of ice a thousand feet thick, and its glaciers bear little resemblance to the polite little rivers of ice of Europe. One glacier he saw "was a plastic, semi-solid mass, obliterating life, swallowing rocks and islands, and ploughing its way with irresistible march." Kane's hardships in Greenland ruined his health, and he died a few years later. But his writings and drawings made the Ice Age that Agassiz had proposed a palpable reality.

Agassiz, by then a celebrated professor of natural science at Harvard, was finally vindicated. But Lyell, ever the politician, scooped him; he immediately published a new book. In it, Lyell acknowledged that an Ice Age had occurred, but he showed that some of Agassiz's original speculations about its effects were wrong. By making Agassiz's errors sound more important than his contributions, the politician won the day again, leaving Agassiz to write bitter letters about the injustice of it all. That result will surprise no one familiar with how science works. Eventually, the truth will win out, but often its discoverer doesn't get the proper credit. In this well-written book, Bolles sets the record straight and gives Agassiz the recognition he deserves.

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