Shawn Marshall's The Cryosphere forms part of the ‘Princeton Primers in Climate’ series and, as such, is of a handy size (that will slip easily into a jacket pocket), uncluttered by reams of references to published work, and fairly inexpensive. Less positively, the cover and (greyscale) illustrations are somewhat bland and image reproduction is lacklustre. That said the quality of the book's content is beyond question. In its 288 pages The Cryosphere manages to provide an overview of all aspects of the Earth's cryosphere while, at the same time, leaving the reader feeling that he or she has gained significant technical insight into many of its key characteristic processes.
The book is also deliberately written in a highly readable and accessible manner, combining technical analysis with anecdotes, quotations, historical perspective, and even poetry. The text certainly bears the author's stamp: for example, in illustrating the small number of materials that (in common with H2O) are less dense in their solid form than their liquid form, characteristically writes “Imagine the sight of sunlight sparkling off a diamond-berg in a sea of liquid diamond”. That in itself is surely enough to make anybody read on.
The book's nine chapters cover just about all aspects of the Earth's cryosphere, following a very readable Introduction to the Cryosphere (Ch. 1) with an outline of the Material Properties of Snow and Ice (Ch. 2), accurately and evocatively referring to ice as a “quirky and intriguing material”. Chapter 3 covers Snow and Ice Thermodynamics, bringing a close to the coverage of the underlying physical properties of the materials concerned. Chapters 4 through 7 then address the main environments comprising the cryosphere, namely Season Snow and Freshwater Ice (Ch. 4), Sea Ice (Ch. 5), Glaciers and Ice Sheets (Ch. 6), and Permafrost (Ch. 7). Each of these chapters manages, in about 15 to 40 pages each, to convey a thorough and rigorous appraisal of the fundamental properties of these environments as well as the key processes occurring within them and influencing them. These sections are rich in observation and context - including, for example, a table of the most common (twenty-five) Inuit terms for snow on page 73 - as well as being scientifically accurate and rigorous. Revealing the author's own research background, these sections are scattered with the basic equations approximating the key physical processes characterizing these environments.
The final two chapters of the book bring much of what has preceded them together in addressing Cryosphere-Climate Processes (Ch. 8) and The Cryosphere and Climate Change (Ch. 9). Again, these sections are written with authority and are interesting to read, for example deriving a global-scale physical analysis of albedo-temperature interactions and, interestingly, considering the role of the cryosphere as a large-scale latent energy buffer, both in Chapter 8. This in particular, along with the subsequent presentation of changes experienced by the Earth's cryosphere over the past 50 million years or so, allied to a parting expression of the potential societal impacts of continuing ice mass loss and consequent sea level rise, certainly convey a valuable ‘take home’ message for interested readers and policymakers.
The author states early on in The Cryosphere that “The text is intended as a brief introduction to the topic, but I hope that these pages capture the essential physics and character of the cryosphere and inspire others to further exploration of the cryosphere's role in Earth's climate”. This the author manages to do in both an expert and highly readable manner.
