This attractive volume is a full colour illustrated encyclopaedia of glaciers and glaciated landscapes, lavishly populated with more than 600 photographs, maps and diagrams, covering several hundred glacial phenomena from ablation and avalanche through to zastrugi and the zone of traction. The entries are typically very short, each comprising a few lines of explanatory text and one or two-colour images, and it is the wonderful images that dominate the book; each turn of a page revealing another set of beautiful photographs. That the book is called an Atlas rather than a dictionary or encyclopaedia reflects its emphasis on the visual aspect of this pictorial review of glacial phenomena. The images in the book certainly confirm the authors’ assertion that glaciers are “among the world’s most beautiful and fascinating wonders”.

At smaller than the usual large format of a “coffee table book” it manages to combine the visual attractiveness and high production values of that genre with a wealth of scientific and environmental information supported by decades of experience in glacier research, exploration and teaching from this well-known and highly respected pair of authors. Glacier science includes terminology from geology, geography and many other disciplines, and from many different languages. The authors previously produced an online “photo glossary” to explain many of these terms, and this book has emerged from the success and popularity of that resource. The authors recognize that their readership will include students, professionals and the wider public, and they encourage readers to use this book as a supplement to glaciological textbooks that provide more detail. This is not only a valuable reference book, but also an introduction to the subject and a foundation for further research.

There are other dictionaries and glossaries in this field, such as the Glossary of glacier mass balance and related terms published by UNESCO (Cogley et al. Reference Cogley, Hock, Rasmussen, Arendt, Bauder, Braithwaite, Jansson, Kaser, Möller, Nicholson and Zemp2011) and freely available online, and huge volumes such as the Encyclopedia of snow, ice and glaciers published by Springer (Singh et al. Reference Singh, Singh and Haritashya2011) and priced at around £360. However, this new atlas is unique in its combination of scientific pedigree, accessibility to a wide readership, and visual appeal.

The 371-page atlas section of the book is preceded by a 28-page introduction divided into sections on: types and distribution of glaciers; glaciers in Earth’s history; glaciers and climate; glacier dynamics and debris entrainment; glacier hydrology; glacial erosional processes; glacial depositional processes; glacial landscapes; and glaciers and human civilization. The core of the book is the extensive illustrated glossary of terms, which does an excellent job of covering a very wide range of material, albeit with relatively brief entries. The highlight of this section compared with any rival publication is the great range and quality of photographs. The ten-page index usefully includes geographical locations as well as the glacial phenomena referred to in the text. Recognizing that the images in the book are a potentially valuable resource to people now and in the future monitoring how glaciers are responding to environmental change, the authors have included in the figure captions the month and year in which photographs were taken. This small, but thoughtful detail illustrates the experience and care that has gone into this excellent volume. Whilst the hardback is expensive there will be a paperback version at half the price in March 2018 as well as its availability as an eBook.