The Big Thaw: Adventures in the Vanishing Arctic [ペーパーバック]

Climate change's effects are reshaping the Arctic profoundly. Landscapes are being radically transformed, animal habitats are disappearing, and natural resources are being revealed to an energy-starved world. Veteran Arctic journalist Ed Struzik took eleven trips throughout the north to document this rapidly changing land, gaining unprecedented access to scientific expeditions, native communities and security and sovereignty experts.

The product of those trips, The Big Thaw is the only book that looks at global warming's wide-ranging impact on the Arctic. Struzik goes into the field with the world's leading polar bear scientist, skis on melting glaciers with glaciologists, travels the Northwest Passage on an aging icebreaker and stalks a carnivorous rogue walrus with an Inuit hunter. His journeys bring him up close to some of the world's most unique animals, from the iconic polar bear to the mysterious narwhal.

Struzik melds the vivid stories of his experiences with fascinating explorations of the Arctic's past -- from the alligators and giant tortoises that inhabited the north 55 million years ago, to the 19th century explorers who died searching for the Open Polar Sea -- and its possible future as the center of international struggle, underground smuggling and ecological disaster.

A recipient of more than 30 awards for his writing, Struzik was nominated for the Grantham Prize for Excellence in reporting on the Environment, and has received multiple national magazine and national newspaper awards, eight Canadian Science Writers' Association awards, the Knight Science fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Southam Fellowship at the University of Toronto and the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. Struzik is also a multiple Citation of Merit recipient of the Roland Michener Award for Meritorious Public Service in Journalism and a recipient of the Sir Sandford Fleming Medal, awarded by the Royal Canadian Institute, Canada's oldest scientific society, for outstanding contribution to the understanding of science in Canada.

Ed Struzik lives in Edmonton, Alberta, with his wife and two children.