This is another story of scientific detection: how clues scattered over the landscape were recognized as signs of widespread glaciation. In this book, Edmund Blair Bolles describes how people realized that glaciers and ice-fields were part of the earth's history, and that periods of glaciation explained some features that were previously attributed to the Biblical Flood of Jewish myth.

ISBN 1-58243-101-9

See also:
- The Seashell on the Mountaintop: The Humble Genius Who Disovered a New History of the Earth
- Toronto Rocks: Toronto's Geological Legacy
- To see what everyone has seen and think what no one has thought by Lister Sinclair
- Kabloona by Gontran de Poncins
- Search for a living fossil: The story of the coelacanth by Eleanor Clymer
- Frozen in Time: Unlocking the Secrets of the Franklin Expedition
- Fallacies of Creationsim

This book ties together the researches of scientists all over Europe with the Kane's exploration, 20 years later, of the coast of Greenland and Canada's arctic islands. The exploration story is particularly intense, and I think I'd enjoy the stories more if they were told one at a time instead of the author's cutting back and forth between them. This book covers a hundred years of discovery and debate, and makes it clear that the dating of rocks by fossils and fossils by rocks is not circular reasoning, but stepped: geology enabled scientists to date SOME rocks, which gave them dates for SOME fossils, which helped them to date OTHER rocks and fossils, all the while gathering in other supporting lines of evidence.

Finished the book. The author makes clear that scientists are humans who are motivated by self-esteem and jealousy, and that they cling to their pre-conceived notions. But they also change their minds when the weight of evidence becomes overwhelming. Louis Agassiz spent years gathering evidence for an ice age because he wanted to prove that God had wiped out all life on earth and started again with a new Creation. Charles Lyell denied the evidence of ice movement because he didn't want to believe that the earth could be so different in the past. He spent years trying to prove that flooding and icebergs could have moved the erratics found all over Europe. Elisha Kent Kane undertook a romantic voyage to explore the Arctic and nearly died as a result but came back a wiser man who had seen the last stronghold of the Ice Age. This story spans many years and illustrates clearly the wandering but self-correcting path of science.

See also:
- Great Feuds in Medicine by Hal Hellman
- Galileo's Commandment: An Anthology of Great Science Writing edited by Edmund Blair Bolles

It was visiting the staff at Spine & Sport physiotherapy, but now it's back.

The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age by Edmond Blair Bolles, explains how we slowly learned that the Earth had experienced eons of time and change in which evolution could occur. Professor Louis Agassiz recognized that species had gone extinct and found European evidence of former glaciation, and Elisha Kent Kane was an adventurer who saw in the Greenland ice cap the remnants of the Ice Age. Charles Lyell, a famous geologist, "politicked" among his peers to resist and then to promote the theory of ice ages.