I've always been a sucker for glacier lingo, whimsical words for a harsh landscape gouged, smoothed and bulldozed by ice. Moulins, drumlins, eskers and moraines. Cirques and aretes. Cold katabatic winds blowing down a mountain, huffed from a glacier's snout and said to be its spirit. Jemma Wadham's Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity leans into this duality of whimsy and harshness, cheerfully pulling readers into this strange, icy world. Wadham, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol in England, confesses that her goal is to give readers a sense of connection to glaciers, which she knowingly anthropomorphizes: In her writing, glaciers have heavy bodies, dirty snouts and veins filled with water. "When I'm with them, I feel like I'm among friends," she writes. "It is, in many ways, a love story." And knowing the glaciers, she reasons - perhaps coming to love them - is key to trying to save them.
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