Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator

Description

In this vivid memoir of a life in science, ecologist Paul Colinvaux takes his readers from the Alaskan tundra to steamy Amazon jungles, from the Galapagos Islands (before tourists had arrived) to the high Andes and the Darien Gap in Panama. He recounts an adventurous tale of exploration in the days before GPS and satellite mapping, and a tale no less exhilarating of his battle to disprove a hypothesis endorsed by most of the scientific community.   Colinvaux’s grand endeavor, begun in the 1960s, was to find fossil evidence of the ice-age climate and vegetation of the entire American equator, from Pacific to Atlantic. The accomplishment of the task by the author and his colleagues involved finding unknown ancient lakes, lugging drilling equipment through uncharted Amazon jungle, operating hand drills from rubber boats in water 40 meters deep, and inventing a pollen analysis for a land with 80,000 species of plants. Colinvaux’s years of arduous travel and research ultimately disproved a hotly defended hypothesis explaining bird distribution peculiarities in the Amazon forest. The story of how he arrived at a new understanding of the Amazon is at once an adventurous saga, an account of science as it is conducted in the field, and a cautionary tale about the temptation to treat a  favored hypothesis with a reverence that subverts unbiased research.   Contents Preface Acknowledgments Prologue: Trial in Alaska 1. The Reason Why 2. The Galapagos That Darwin Knew 3. Galapagos Climate History: The Eastern Pacific and the Ice-Age Amazon 4. Pleistocene Refuge and the Arid Amazon Hypothesis 5. The Republic of the Equator 6. Refuge Theory Expands in Brazil 7. The Paradigm and the Prophet 8. Amazon’s Bitter Lakes 9. On the Trail of Francisco de Orellana 10. Ice-Age Forest Found 11. Pollen, Anacondas, and the Cool, Damp Breeze of Doubt 12. The Paradigm Strikes Back 13. The Adventure of the Darien Gap 14. The Adventure of the Floating Forest 15. The Adventure of the Customs Shed 16. The Adventure of the Inselberg That Leaked 17. Ice Ages from an Amazon Inselberg 18. Two Thousand Fathoms Thy Pollen Lies 19. Maicuru, the Last Adventure 20. Paradigm Coup de Grace Notes Index