There’s no question that the title of the latest Virginia Quarterly Review, “The End of Ice,” is meant to be taken literally. In travelogues that chronicle experiences as divergent as ice hunters blasting away at errant icebergs in Newfoundland’s White Bay to adolescents following the chaddar, or frozen river-highway, out of a village in the Indian Himalayas to a Western education, the latest issue attempts to draw in full dramatic relief the human face of what most scientists now agree will be the most significant, catastrophic effect of global warming: the wholesale extinction of glacial ice.
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The starting point is a report by a team of geophysicists at the University of Toronto warning that the effects of even a partial collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would be truly colossal; I feel compelled to repeat what is stated well enough in Ted Genoways’ “Editor’s Desk”—that the least effects of this might be a sudden shift of weight, knocking the planet half a kilometer off its axis and redistributing the seawater to the Northern Hemisphere. Some of you might appreciate the poetic justice in America paying the heaviest price for its failure to act, with nearly half of our 40 most populous cities underwater, but I don’t. The trouble is that the truth is almost too overwhelming to be believed, much less acted on, and so the point of this issue is to fill in the gaps in our disbelief with local, human drama, in bite-sized pieces, of what’s happening to glacial environments out there. The results are more than just terrifying: They are remarkably poignant, entertaining and even uplifting.
I won’t try to recreate what stood out for me as an extraordinarily powerful issue, but I should reiterate some of the issue’s fun facts for those of you who might not yet be true believers in the face of overwhelming scientific, anecdotal and statistical evidence. So here goes: First, the part of the earth that contains the only unclaimed portion of territory is also the most threatened by global warming—West Antarctica, a massive glacier that may also contain the planet’s last “supergiant” oil field. Second, the rate of retreat for Peru’s Quelccaya, the world’s largest tropical glacier, has increased tenfold in the last 30 years, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the continent’s fresh water supply and rainfall. Third, from 1990 to 2005, world energy consumption increased by 30 percent. Fourth, the carbon dioxide that emanates from the tailpipe of the cars we drive will last for at least 300 years once it’s been emitted, and at least a quarter of it will last forever. I could go on, but then you might be too terrified and depressed to complete the issue.
Outside of the climate-concerned “VQR Portfolio” section, one can find more amazing stuff: An essay about the Oakes twins, visual artists who are rethinking perspective itself; a large chunk of Rita Dove’s new book, Sonata Mulattica; a particularly creepy profile of an Macedonian serial killer; and a genuinely great poem by Jim Harrison, entitled “The Golden Eye,” in which the poet’s mother asks a startling question: “Are we the same species as God?” Reading the essays in “The End of Ice,” I have to think that I know the answer to that question, but I will let you pick up the latest issue and find your own answer.