[applause] thanks all of you for coming out on this balmy evening for a conversation on the history of a very cold place. We are proud to present jon gertners new book the ice at the end of the world an epic journey into greenlandb buried past and our perilous future which tells the story of how people have encountered, muddied, settled and then unsettled by the great ice sheet thatcovers greenland , the World Largest island and of what changes to the ice sheet and tell us about the ongoing impact of Global Warming on sea levels and what it threatens the future of civilization. My name is, horse kimono, director of the Coleman Center. Take this moment to silence your cell phones. Before we begin tonight program we really must take a moment to reflect on some recent news. Last friday as many of you know, louis coleman, our founding benefactor and friend died. He was 100 years old. It was his and his wifes dorothys ingenious generosity that made this center possible. It was in fact dorothys idea at the place should include creative writers along with scholars and othernonfiction writers. He died in 2009. Every year in the fall since the beginning of the Coleman Center lewis and the 15 fellows and their dates up to his apartment for dinner and conversation. His ride and the work of the more than 300 fellows of the center and its first 20 years was infectious and is gets ensured that fellows will be working here on new books for many, many years to come. Louis coleman gave to the arts, education and research all over the city and the country, he gave to the library of performing arts, to the metropolitan museum, moma and the new York Botanical garden and his urging of others to give generously until it hurts was legendary. He wrote a book about getting. You cant take it with you, the art of making and giving money. He was swap, strive, with weighted and inspirational to the end. We continue to thank him and we will miss him. As many of you know, this series presents the work of the dorothy and lewis the Coleman Center for scholars and writers. Our program selects 15 fellows a year for a nine month term at the library with a stipend to cover their expenses. Fellows are some of the best and most promising academics, independents, scholars, poets, playwrights, artists and fiction writers at work today. They come here from around the country and the world use the unparalleled collections at this library to write the books of tomorrow. When the fellows published the booksthey write, we try to show them off at a program like this one. If youd like to know more about events in this series is it and why pl. Org conversation. Youll find books for sale like nights guest and they generously agreed to sign them after the program. Youll note tonights event is being recorded for later broadcast by cspan so its time to ask questions a little more than halfway through the hour we ask that you stand and please use a microphone that one of our staff will hand down the aisle. Leading the discussion tonight will be our esteemed past fellow victoria johnson who is a fellow from 2015 2016. Her own Coleman Center book which we were proud to help launch here last year was american eating, david bostic , botany and medicine in the garden of the early republic, published last year failed in the New York Times as both an ambitious and entertaining book. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book awardand National Book award and pulitzer prize. She had a hell of a year. Victoria johnson holds degrees in philosophy from yale and sociology from columbia and she is an associate professor of urban policy and planning at hunter college. She seeks tonight with our friend jon gertner, a frequent contributor to national magazines, most often to the New York Times magazine where he writes on science, nature and technology. His bestselling first book the idea factory published in 2012 told the story of bell labs, the Research Wing of at t andits impact on american innovation. Of his new book us today writes in a review that came out five minutes ago that the ice at the end of the world offers a compelling narrative about human beings curiosity about the world wars them to forgetting places and will also find when they go, they bring hot chocolate because they are norwegians. Elizabeth colbert calls it a gripping and important book. We will open the floor to questions from all of you, in the meantime please welcome tori johnson and jon gertner. Thank you salvador. John, congratulations on a beautiful and important book. This book the ice at the end of the world manages to be haunting and poetic and offer the reader a sciencebased narrative that will be usually enlightening to many readers. I was reminded while i was reading your book of what the historian andrea wolf has noted about the explorer alexander humboldt. She said he insisted that to understand nature and to celebrate nature, one must be both poet and scientist. So your last book was about bell labs and was in suburban newjersey. And so then we went very far to one of the most punishing expanses of land and ice on earth. In the introduction to the, the ice at the end of the world you offer a tantalizing remark by the scientist and sold out who in the 1930s flew over greenland. You quote him as saying im looking at a landscape of vast simplicity is nowhere to be surpassed on earth and yet conceals 1000 secrets. You then after the introduction take us on a journey with explorers and scientists who are trying to unlock those secrets. Could you tell me what first got you interested in moving from suburban new jersey to greenland and when did you decide there might be a book in it . First off, thank you, that was very kind and im glad you like the book and thank you for coming as well. I sort of found myself asking myself as im on this plane to greenland, why . Its not easy to get to greenland either, youve got to go through denmark and you fly on Air Greenland if youve never been to greenland but i ended up making six trips and i often wondered how i got there but my first book looked at innovation and it was very focused on what we do to solve problems. What we do to create i think new products that change the world and when i was done with that i had really been focused on Climate Change as i had also been writing for the New York Times magazine and writing about Climate Change for a few years and i wanted to do more on that. I wasnt quite sure how to go about doing that. And at the same time i also bought id written this book on innovation, i really want to write about discovery itches this thing that happens before innovation happens. When we find new knowledge and were not trying to make a new product, were trying to maybe just find new knowledge anddo something with the knowledge. And i think that takes us right about 2012 when my first book came out and just about that time, the Greenland Ice sheet started to melt quite dramatically. There were a couple summer days where the whole ice sheet, the surface of the ice sheet completely melted and this was a time where Climate Change race worked really in the news as much and if you were following certain news organizations or news feeds you could follow that news and it struck me that maybe this was a way to sort of write about Climate Change but i already knew that there was a kind of deeper story of discovery there, not only how we knew that this massive ice sheet was nothing how we had investigated it as well. And i really just began to read and think about how to structure it and it began from there. So you said you took six trips to greenland. This is a place that for many of us is a tip of land we see on the inflight map on the way toeurope. Could you tell us, im sure there are people in the room who been to greenland but can you tell us what its like they are, what were your First Impressions if you remember them and what did you do there . Yeah, well sometimes i flew commercial and sometimes i had the opportunity to fly on some nasa flights and military flights. Part of the problem with getting to greenland is you cant go directly from jfk or newark. You kind of like over greenland and you fly back to greenland which is, theres a theory that you can do it all in one day but you have to run through the copenhagen airport at breakneck speed and maybe miss the connecting flight that goes from new york to copenhagen and copenhagen to greenland but the first time i landed there i remember taking a deep breath and the air there is so crystal, this is a country where its only 56,000 people. Theres no real industry, theres no trees. In many ways its a combination and i dont say this jointly but a kind of third world first world combination. A place where denmark is brought in a certain amount of sophistication but where the inuit traditions also exist and where there is basically pockets of villages that really feel like something from another century. Without plumbing, without any kind of modern conveniences and the overwhelming feeling is that once you get out of the village of this past, beautiful emptiness of rocks and lakes that go on almost forever in a way that as somebody told me there, theres no many lakes in greenland that they dont even have names. There are just too many to name and when youre flying over them or driving past them, there are no roads connecting the towns. Sometimes youre taking these small airplanes from town to town in a place that feels i think, which is kind of rare today, eels untouched. How do you go about how did you go about conducting research in greenland . One thing i found disappointing when, i started following my editors to is that theres only a short Summer Season so its not like you can pick up and go to greenland during the winter. Its dark all the time in the winter and they really keep it, they keep the science part of the work between may and august. So really if you want to embed yourself with a scientific expedition or a group doing work there you have to work ahead of time and i did a variety of things. I worked a lot getting involved with different actor projects. There were some flights over greenland where they did something called Remote Sensing where theyre trying to measure the ice sheet so maybe we will talk about that in a little bit but youre flying over the ice sheet all day long. Youre not on the ground, youre measuring it from above. I spent time with glaciologist who were measuring glaciers and others met measuring algae that goes on and measuring water streams so i think usually its just working a year ahead of time trying to involve with a variety of scientific projects and i cant even explain how many scientists are there during Summer Season. In the book i call it a lost alamos of the modern era except everybodys studying ice rather than Nuclear Energy or Atomic Energy and really just not only glaciologist split oceanographers and those digging into ruins of ancient cultures so its a really exciting place to be for science but again, you have to work in advance. You chose open the book with one of those flights, i think it was in 2015 and you, it was a brilliant way to open the book because you take us along with you and you reflect on this task, this vast expanse beneath you and you begin to reflect on the history and its a way of introducing the readers to the scope of what were about to embark on while serving as a kind of personal guide. And i felt very much being taken by the hand and led into an unfamiliarterrain. Could you read from the beginning of the book . Can i borrow someones book . I left my book in there. I should know this book by heart. But thank you, ill givethis right back. If i could set this up, it was, what was known as a nasa ice bridge flight and i ended up with this theme for about a week and what you would do is show up in the town and the nasa team was there. It was a team of technologists and they had outfitted a special plane that was a c130 military plane. The inside was pretty much emptied out of seeds that they had put all sorts of special equipment within the inside of it. And this plane wassort of a stateoftheart vehicle to measure the ice bar. And you would wake up in the morning and then you would follow a certain route on any particular day and the plane would measure the ice on the ball in a variety of different ways by radar, my laser. And photography too. So im going to pick up with that first day i think, if i could. It was my first flight for, with an nasa team on the c130 anda kind of it fills in a little bit if i could of what we were doing. On the morning after our c130arrived , we took off on thatfirst ice bridge flight. Our route from the west coast was plotted across the island. Through the southeast toward greenland and eastern coast where dark piece up like huge animal teeth from a historic crust of snowcovered ice. It would be a long ride, greenland is the Worlds Largest island, i times the size of california and three timesthe size of texas. Just over 80 percent of the land is covered by the centralized sheet. So its home to a population of about 86,000 people. Most of whom are descendents of native in ux, this is the least densely populated nation on earth. Only antarctica on the opposite end of the globe and not a country is more barren. And only antarctica has more ice. After we took off, we stumbled through a layer of quick clouds for a half an hour but the sky soon cleared and the white world below the crispresolution. The strategy for these missions is not to fly high but to fly low. They study all day at 1500 feet is ideal. There was agreement on the c130 ice sheet at least from ourheight tended to look like handmade paper , the kind sometimes used for spine stationary with visiblefibers and textured imperfections. But the technicians on the flight but very little time gazing out at the scenery with theclearing whether they began scrutinizing their computer screens , watching sine waves and radar images and the data streaming in about the icebelow. At that point i made my way through the main cabin for the front of the plane. From there i could up a short letter to the flight deck and watch rhubarb cockpit windows as the pilots skimmed over greenlands frozen interior. For three hours, we passed about this pale world until we last approached the east coast and begantrailing the snaking course of big glaciers. Wide rivers of ice flow from the edges of the ice sheet down through mountain valleys to the oceans dark edge where they collapse and explode into the ice stream chaos. Without exception, what lay below was a site of uncommon beauty and uncommon strangeness. Taking in the immense expensive greenland from low altitude was like surveying the landscape of some kind of frozen excel planet. There was a hard blackness of the coastal mountains, soft likeness of the ice sheet. The only color intruding on the scenery was a light blue of the sky and a deeper blue from crevasses and ice that radiated a luminous glow. Down below there were no people, no houses, for hours on end it was only ice and rock, ice and rock and in my notebook i wrote someone would think we left no traces here at all. Many of the places below had names though and during the course of the day and those that followed i could piece together from my aerial view history of an island where men and women have spent centuries charting a vast emptiness that had turned out to be anything but empty. Along the coast, greenlands peninsulas to send glaciers were the names of explorers who passed this way on expeditions in the 19 and early 20th centuries. Many of these people were fairly obscure, all of them were now dead. Now below there were also reminders of a more recent age of science as our plane at the center of the island we ward over coordinates mark historical sites from the 1930s and 1950s. Scientific outposts in the middle of the ice sheet were largely surveyed in our understanding of the earth. These cancer invisible, lost 15 between decades of accumulating ice and snow near to where they stood i can discern a place still functional, a research station located in the dead center of the icesheet , cited at an altitude of10,000 feet. A cluster of buildings comprise of a camp, down below i saw a few tractors often white and all signs of civilization away and our plane was again resuming the nothingness ofthe ice sheet. I had to remind myself it wasnt actually nothingness. I recall the story from the early 1930s about a german glaciologist named can sort out who took one of the first flights over greenland centralized, white desert as it was sometimes called and as a passenger in a small airplane. Sort i had already spent a brutal winter in the center of the ice sheet. He also traversed many times by dogsled. But the view from above that day was different and what he had so far encountered. Transfixed him, he would later write i said to myself im looking at a landscape whose vast simplicity is nowhere to be surpassed on earth and which yet conceals 1000secrets. I see we both have thesame favorite line in the book. So beautiful and haunting. And thats one of the i think only two spots in the book where you introduce yourself as a narrator. Right, yeah. Im sorry, thats my insight. How did you make that decision because i love actually of opening the book and after that you end up, you take us on a largely chronological, not entirely but largely chronological trip to greenlands history with the explorers and scientists. How did you decide not to put yourself in . I struggled a lot to sort of, this inside baseball stuff writers and i had settled on writing a chronological history. But i also wanted to have some kind of way to bring that history and i cant, what keeps writers up at night is how much of afirst person who i put in or not in your thinking about this all the time and i carry that question around with mefor years. And the solution , many of my other thoughts work, they work. Was put myself in the introduction and put myselfin the epilogue. And those are your and now moments in time where im kind of introducing the book but then the actual chapters of the book go back to the 1880s which we will talk about in a minute and i put myself completely out of that part and i think it seems very hard to kind of the reason those explorers were so rich, i couldnt imagine i either need to be a part of it or wanted to be a part of it and