Antipodal beauty, literary panache

Bill Green is a scientist who is in love with words. When asked to explain his ability to spin words into the spellbinding narrative that is Water, Ice & Stone, he says that it goes back to letter writing. "I used to write letters to everyone back home, family, friends and colleagues, and I took it very seriously. I never sent a first draft. That and just reading, I have always been fascinated by literature." In Water, Ice & Stone, Green tells the story of his love affair with Antarctica and shares his wonder at the mysteries posed by its rivers and lakes. Since 1968 Green, a retired Miami University of Ohio geochemistry professor, has made frequent trips to Antarctica to study the dynamic biological, chemical, and geological processes in the continent's waters.

Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and a member of our board until his recent death, said: "I am deeply impressed by Water, Ice & Stone -- it deserves to be savored one page at a time." I couldn't agree more. See what you think:

From Chapter 12, "Whiteout":

On the occasion of Planck's sixtieth birthday, Einstein began his eulogy for the great quantum theorist by talking of the motives that lead us to science and art. He spoke of the need to escape everyday life with its dreariness, its changing desires. To move beyond grocery lists and mounds of papers, the bills coming due. "A finely tempered nature," he said, "longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and though this desire may be compared to the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity."

Anyone who has done science has felt this, has waited, almost palpitantly, for this moment. But before the mountains, there is the valley; before the vision, there are the prayers and the fasts and the rituals; before the summit, there is the long climb over rock and scree and fallen ice; and there are the crushing doubts that you will ever arrive, that you will ever be blessed enough.


From Chapter 4, "The Map":

To imagine the world in which [Lystrosaurus] lived is to imagine Antarctica as a different place. The Antarctica of Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic and Jurassic times was everything the continent today is not: a land of warmth and wetness joined with other lands in some great Earth-wide conspiracy of organic wealth. To geologists and paleontologists, the sandstones and fossils of Coalsack Bluff conjure a diorama of lakes and rivers and braided streams where, under the fronds of giant ferns, Lystrosaurus roamed and grazed, plunged in mud like a small hippo.

On the map that hung before me there were stories of coal and reptiles and therapsids, things threading their way up out of the past. The continent had been a garden, in the way we think of gardens, wild and serpent-filled and warm. And it had not always been here, in these regions of isolation. It had creaked and broken and split and jerked mountains straight into the air and had torn itself asunder, stretched its rock like taffy, spinning away, out of the reaches of South America, trailing islands and peninsulas like bits of cosmic dust. The story the geologists have written, from bone and rock and ripple marks, from ancient rain prints recorded in stone, is long and loose in its details and so recent in its writing that it can almost be called contemporary fiction were it not surely science.


From Chapter 14, "The Gallery":

There is no Gallery of Science. Not here, not anywhere. Somehow we have come to think of science, at its best, as discovery. We think of the scientist as someone like James Clark Ross, who, setting sail upon the waters of the unknown, comes, perhaps at great sacrifice, into the Land of Light; who nudges his ship through ice floes and howling winds into the safe harbor beneath the mountain; who gestures and points and names everything within view. This is discovery; coming nobly and with great fortitude and perseverance and with no little wit and energy upon that which already exists, upon that which, however hidden and far away, is already with us. Just as Ross came upon these islands and ice shelves and sea, so too did Dalton, we think, come upon his atoms, Rutherford upon his nucleus, Henry Frank upon his flickering clusters deep within the structure of water, and Robert Garrels upon his cycles of carbon and oxygen endlessly turning through geologic time. We think of the scientists, at best, as discoverers. It is the artist alone for whom we reserve the word creator, for whom we offer the quiet observances and protocols, the diminished voices, of the gallery.

Perhaps this distinction is too simple, perhaps there is something about science we are missing.

Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes
by Bill Green, Bellevue Literary Press, paper, 261 pages.