THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD IS AT STAKE! Terrorists have buried nuclear weapons deep in the massive Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf and threaten to detonate them -- causing worldwide tidal waves and a catastrophic rise in the oceans -- if the free world doesn't pay a huge ransom. Climatologist Henry Scott Gibbs, out on the ice shelf studying the aurora, interrupted the terrorists in their lethal task. They shot him and left him for dead, but somehow he survived. Now, as the only witness, he holds the key to saving the world from the disaster. In the company of a navy SEAL task force and FBI staffer Sarah French he joins the desperate search for the maniac who threatens global destruction. The hunt takes him from the snows of Antarctica to the final bloody climax in a remote Andean hacienda. Breathlessly exciting, this epic adventure leads Gibbs on a personal quest too -- a quest to discover friendship, true love, and the untapped depths of his own courage. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

The line-scan images collected in this book represent the most accurate optical record of Antarctic ice cores ever presented, providing an invaluable resource for glaciologists and climate modellers, as well as a fascinating compilation of ice core images for Antarctica enthusiasts. Global warming and the Earth’s past climate are the two main reasons for extracting deep ice cores from Antarctica. Indeed, dust particles, aerosols and other climatic traces deposited on the snow surface, as well as the air trapped in bubbles by compacted snow, produce chronologically ordered strata, making the ice from Antarctica the most accurate and valuable archive of the Earth’s climate over the last million years. In addition, the layered structure produced by these strata, when revealed by appropriate methods, provides indispensable information concerning the flow and mechanical stability of the Antarctic ice sheet, allowing us to assess the current and future impact of global warming on the melting of polar ice caps with much greater precision.

The surfaces of the deep ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica were contaminated during drilling at concentration levels several orders of magnitude greater than those found in the uncontaminated ice. Several procedures for removing these contaminants were studied. Ultrasonic vibration followed by self-cleaning in meltwater was found to be the most effective procedure for removal of surface contamination. (Author).

Chemical analysis of century-old ice from continuous 5 to 7 year intervals of three ice cores from south and central Greenland (Dye 3, Milcent and Crete) show maximum concentrations of Na, Mg, Ca, K and Al during early spring and minimum concentrations during late summer and early fall. Peak spring values are as much as 10 times greater than fall values. Because of the large seasonal chemical variations, samples used for depth-age or annual deposition rate studies must represent accumulation from exactly one year or whole multiples of a year. The seasonal chemical variations seem promising as a new method of defining annual layers and thus dating old ice cores. (Author).