Dispatches from the end of ice: essays

Description

Shortly after moving, for a few months, to a tiny village near Europe’s largest glacier, things in Beth Peterson’s life began to disappear. First there was the glacier—melting at a breakneck pace and taking plants and animals along with the ice—but then people she knew also began to vanish. A professor went missing while hiking a volcano in Japan; a friend wandered off a mountain trail they were hiking in Norway together; finally, Peterson fell into a crevasse herself while hiking. In an effort to make sense of all of these disappearances, Peterson went to libraries and museums and talked to historians, guides, and scientists; she traveled to Italy, England, France, Switzerland, and back to the States, visiting a cryonics institute, a wunderkammer, a philosopher’s cabin, and eventually, the furthest edge of the glacial ice. Part-lyric, part-personal essay, and part- research-reportage, the book ultimately considers not only the shifting ice, but also taxonomies of loss and the furthest limits of naming.