Imagine a world of wildly escalating temperatures, apocalyptic flooding, devastating storms and catastrophic sea levels. This might sound like a prediction for the future or the storyline of a new Hollywood blockbuster but it’s actually what occurred on earth in the past. In a day and age when worrying forecasts for future climate change are the norm, it seems hard to believe that such things happened regularly over time. Can humankind decipher the past and learn from it? As science gains new understanding of how the planet works, it’s becoming increasingly clear that no one place is disconnected from anywhere else. From the Alps to the Andes, seemingly unrelated parts of the world are connected in one way or another. By reading this book you’ll realize that we're facing challenges beyond anything our species has had to contend with before.

“The Antarctic Factor: if anything can go wrong, it will. It's basically Murphy's Law on steroids.” —Chris Turney On Christmas Eve 2013, off the coast of East Antarctica, an abrupt weather change trapped the Shokalskiy—the ship carrying earth scientist Chris Turney and seventy-one others involved in the Australasian Antarctic Expedition—in densely packed sea ice, 1400 miles from civilization. The forecast offered no relief—a blizzard was headed their way. As Turney chronicles his ordeal, he revisits the harrowing Antarctic expedition of famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton on his ship, Endurance, as well as the legendary explorations of Douglas Mawson. But for Turney, the stakes were even higher: he had his wife and children with him. Turney was connected to the outside world through Twitter, YouTube, and Skype. Within hours, the team became the focus of a media storm, and an international rescue effort was launched to reach the stranded ship. But could help arrive in time to avert a tragedy? A taut 21st-century survival story, Iced In is also an homage to all scientific explorers who embody the human spirit of adventure, joy in discovery, and will to live. “Traveling in the footsteps of the great explorers Ernest Shackleton and Douglas Mawson, Turney draws on records from their journeys, making comparisons versus his own struggle in this enjoyable armchair adventure.” —Booklist “A classic adventure tale of a fight for survival. Turney’s account brings a chill to the spine.” —Herald Sun, Melbourne “Exciting and compelling reading.” —Good Reading With a New Epilogue by the Author

This book delves into the environmental changes that have taken place during the Quaternary: the two to three million years during which humans have inhabited the Earth, and conveys the relevance of the study of this period to current environmental and climatic concerns.

Murphy presents a vision of an America gone off the rails: a place where it literally rains cats and dogs, where a hubcap ranch is now a National Preservation Site, where a horde of circus folk and Elvis fans are on the rampage--and where some rather suspicious things are going on with time and gravity.

A rich and revelatory memoir of a young woman reclaiming her courage in the stark landscapes of the north. By the time Blair Braverman was eighteen, she had left her home in California, moved to arctic Norway to learn to drive sled dogs, and found work as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska. Determined to carve out a life as a “tough girl”—a young woman who confronts danger without apology—she slowly developed the strength and resilience the landscape demanded of her. By turns funny and sobering, bold and tender, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube brilliantly recounts Braverman’s adventures in Norway and Alaska. Settling into her new surroundings, Braverman was often terrified that she would lose control of her dog team and crash her sled, or be attacked by a polar bear, or get lost on the tundra. Above all, she worried that, unlike the other, gutsier people alongside her, she wasn’t cut out for life on the frontier. But no matter how out of place she felt, one thing was clear: she was hooked on the North. On the brink of adulthood, Braverman was determined to prove that her fears did not define her—and so she resolved to embrace the wilderness and make it her own. Assured, honest, and lyrical, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube paints a powerful portrait of self-reliance in the face of extraordinary circumstance. Braverman endures physical exhaustion, survives being buried alive in an ice cave, and drives her dogs through a whiteout blizzard to escape crooked police. Through it all, she grapples with love and violence—navigating a grievous relationship with a fellow musher, and adapting to the expectations of her Norwegian neighbors—as she negotiates the complex demands of being a young woman in a man’s land. Weaving fast-paced adventure writing and ethnographic journalism with elegantly wrought reflections on identity, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube captures the triumphs and the perils of Braverman’s journey to self-discovery and independence in a landscape that is as beautiful as it is unforgiving.

Presents a history of climate to reveal that the climatic changes happening hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion years.

Vera Moonachie is writing a mystery with criminal lawyer Fulton Yee. He won't tell her the murderer, so she won't drop hints. Abruptly, Fulton disappears. Now caught in a murder investigation, Vera goes to the storied Sacramento Delta to unravel the tangled skein of a bloody murder planned to resolve an old Sacramento Delta land dispute. Vera is drawn into the bizarre lives of an aging actor, a chef, and the hornet's nest of Fulton's feuding trio of lovers. As she walks a knife's edge between brutal rivals in an authorship dispute, Vera must find Fulton; find out why he disappeared; and find out who is the murderer in her own novel. And then, against an approaching book deadline, someone tries to kill Vera. Old agreements can be murder.