Description: Sure to dazzle all those who loved Longitude and Into the Wild, this nautical adventure aboard a fifty-foot sailboat charts the bleakest and most awesome landscape of our planet -- and one man's fierce will to understand it. By any account, the impenetrable barrier of sea ice that blocked the Brendan's Isle halfway up the Labrador Coast should not have been there in July, in what was one of the hottest summers on record a few hundred miles to the south. Frustrated and mystified at having to turn back so early in his 1991 northbound voyage, sailor Myron Arms became determined to explain the unsettling anomaly. Three years later, having pursued this obsession from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Arms took his boat and a small crew back up the Labrador Coast to test his ideas -- this time making it past the Arctic Circle. Weaving together the unfolding narrative of the voyage itself with a groundbreaking synthesis of the latest theories about Arctic ice production -- and the troubing signals it may now be sending us -- "Riddle of The Ice" is a taut, suspenseful science mystery told as captain's log. With prose that is deft, unfettered, and beautiful, Myron Arms teaches us and warns us as elegantly and effectively as anyone since Bill McKibben or Rachel Carson.

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