Riddle of the Ice: A Scientific Adventure Into the Arctic

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 Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Observatory to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Arms took his fifty-foot sailboat and a small crew back up the 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 troubling signals it may now be sending us - Riddle of the Ice is a taut, suspenseful science mystery told as captain's log.