The Quest by Daniel Yergin

Author:Daniel Yergin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-29T20:00:00+00:00

“GREAT SHEETS OF ICE”

The Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz was also obsessed with glaciers—indeed so obsessed that he put aside his research on fossils of extinct fish in order to probe the workings of glaciers. He even built a hut on the Aar glacier and moved into it so that he might more closely monitor the glacier’s movement.

In 1837, more than a decade before John Tyndall first caught sight of a glacier, Agassiz propounded a revolutionary, even shocking idea. There had once been something before the present age, he declared. That “before” was an ice age, when much of Europe must have been covered by massive glaciers, “great sheets of ice resembling those now in Greenland.” That was an age, he said, when a “Siberian Winter” gripped the world throughout the year, a time when “death enveloped all nature in a shroud.”

The ice, Agassiz maintained, came about due to a sudden, mysterious drop in temperature that was part of a cyclical pattern stretching back to the beginning of earth’s history. As the glaciers had retreated to the north, they had left behind in their wake the valleys and mountains and gorges and lakes and fjords and boulders and gravel that documented their movement.

Agassiz’s bold assertion was met with great skepticism. One colleague advised him, for his own good, to give up on glaciers and instead stick to his “beloved fossil fishes.”

Agassiz would not be swayed. His continuing research provided further evidence on the movement of glaciers, or what he called “God’s great plough.” He later migrated to the United States, where he became a professor at Harvard University. He organized an expedition to the Great Lakes that demonstrated that they had been sculpted into the earth’s surface by the advance and retreat of glaciers—yet more evidence of an ice age. By proving that the earth had lived through different ages in terms of temperature, Agassiz was the real inventor of the idea of climate.6

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