The arctic

Rocks are still and lifeless things, and geologists are men with beards whose emotional bandwidth is taken up with an unnatural attachment to cherts and clasts and the chill beauty of the subducted lithosphere. Such is the stereotype. The academic geologist and New Yorker contributor Marcia Bjornerud has managed to go a fair distance towards dispelling it. In her previous book, Timefulness, she wrote for the general reader and with persuasive lyricism about readjusting our focus to thinking in geological time.

Covering 20 per cent of the Earth’s surface, the boreal forest is the largest living system, or ‘biome’, on land. It contains one third of all the planet’s trees and encircles much of the northern hemisphere in a halo of green. The northernmost extent of this forest, called the treeline, marks the point beyond which it is too cold for trees to grow. This is perhaps not where you’d expect to find Ben Rawlence, an author and journalist whose previous books have focused on humanitarian crises in Africa. But, as he explains in The Treeline, things are changing alarmingly fast in this biome: ‘The trees are on the move. They shouldn’t be. And this sinister fact has enormous consequences for all life on Earth.

Narratives of frozen beards in polar hinterlands never lose their appeal. Most of the good stories have been told, but in Icebound Andrea Pitzer fills a gap, at least for the popular reader in English, with the story of the 16th-century Dutch mariner William Barents. He sailed further north than any man before him and lives still, on the map, with an eponymous sea off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia. In 1594, during the third decade of his country’s war with Spain, Barents voyaged to the unknown Nova Zembla (‘New Land’ in Dutch), planning to find a route to the fabled riches of Cathay. The notion of a navigable northern ocean had tantalised explorers since the Ancient Greeks, and geographers in Amsterdam thought the North Pole would be warm.