[applause] thanks to all of you for coming out on this balmy evening for a conversation on the history of a very cold place. Were proud to present jon gertners new book, the ice at the end of the world, which tells the story of how people have encountered, studied, settled and been unsettled by the great ice sheet that covers greenland, the worlds large island, and of what changes to the ice sheet can tell us about the ongoing impact of Global Warming on sea levels and what it threatens for the future of civilization. My name is salvatore, director of the coleman center. Please take this moment to silence your cell phones. Before we begin tonights program, we really must take a moment to reflect on some recent news. Last friday, as many of you know, louis cullman, our founding benefactor and friend, died. He was 100 years old. It was his and his wife dorothys ingenious generosity that made this center possible. It was, in fact, dorothys idea that the place should include creative writers along with scholars and other nonfiction writers. She died in 2009. Every year in the fall since the beginning of the Cullman Center, louis had the 15 fellows and their dates up to his apartment for dinner and conversation. His pride if the work of the more than 300 fellows of the center in its first 20 years was infectious, and his gifts insured that fellows will be working here on new books for many, many years to come. Louis cullman gave to arts, education and research all over the city and the country. He gave to the library of performing arts, to the metropolitan museum, alma and the new york bow botanical gard. And his urging of others to give generously until it hurt was legendary. He wrote a book about giving. You cant take it with you the art of making and giving money. He was suave, spry, quickwitted, e ebullient 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 louis Cullman Center for scholars and writers. The fellows are some of the very best and most promising academics, independent scholars, poets, play wrights, artists and fiction writers at work today. They come here from around the country and the world to use the unparalleled collections housed at this library to write the books of tomorrow. When the fellows publish the books they write here, we try to show them off at a program like this one. If youd like to know more about events in this series, visit nypl. Org conversations. In the hall youll find books for sale by tonights guest, and he generously agreed to sign them after of the program. Youll note that tonights event is being recorded for later broadcast by cspan, so when its time to ask questions a little more than halfway through the hour, we ask that you stand and, please, use a mona one of our staff 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 20152016, who wrote her own Cullman Center book which we were proud to help launch here last year with, american eden. It was published last year, hailed in the New York Timeses as both an ambitious and entertaining book. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book award, the National Book award and the pulitzer prize. Shes had a hell of a year. Victoria johnson holds degrees in philosophy from yale and in sociology from columbia, and she is an associate professor of urban policy and planning at hunter college. She speaks tonight, of course, with our friend, jon gertner. Hes a frequent contributor to Many National magazines, most often to New York Times magazine where he writes on science, nature and technology. His best selling first book, the idea factory, published in 2012 told the story of bell labs, the Research Wing of at t, and of its impact on American Innovation throughout the 20th century. Of his new book, usa today writes in a review that came out about five minutes ago [laughter] that the ice at the end of the world offers a, quote, compelling narrative about the intrepid human beings whose curiosity about the world lures them to forbidding places, end quote. Youll also find that when they go there, they bring hot chocolate. [laughter] because theyre norwegians. Elizabeth kolbert calls it a gripping and important book. Well open the floor to questions from a all of you later in the program from all of you later in the program. Meantime, please welcome victoria johnson and jon gertner. [applause] thank you, salvatore. Jon, im going to given by congratulating you on a beautiful and important book. This book, the ice at the end of the world with, manages to be both haunting and poetic and to offer the reader a scientific narrative that, i think, will be hugely enlightening to many readers. I was reminded while i was reading your book of what the historian andrea wolfe has noted about an explorer. She said that he insisted that to be, to understand nature and to celebrate nature, one must be both poet and scientist. So your last book was about bell labs. It was in suburban new jersey. And then we went very far to one of the most punishing expanses of land and ice on earth. In the introduction to the ice at the end of the world, you offer a tantalizing remark by the scientist ann solga, who in the 1930s, flew over greenland. You quote him as saying im looking at a landscape whose vast simplicity is nowhere to be surpassed on everett and which yet on earth and which yet conceals a thousand secrets. You then take us on a journey with explorers and scientists who are trying since the late 19th century 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 . Sure. Well, first, thank you, that was very kind. And im thrilled you liked the book, and thank you all for coming as well. You know, i sort of found myself asking myself as im on this plane to greenland, okay, why . Its not easy to get to greenland either. You have to go through denmark, and then you fly on air greenland, if youve never been to greenland. But ended up taking six trips there, and i often sort of wondered how i got there. But, you know, my first book, innovation, and it was very focus thed on what we focused on what we do to solve problems, what we do to kind of, i think, create new products that change the world. And when i was done with that, i had really been focused on Climate Change because i had also been writing for the New York Times magazine. Id been writing about Climate Change for a few years. And i wanted to do a book on that. I wasnt quite sure how to go about doing a book on that. And at the same time, i also thought, well, id written this book on innovation, i really want to write about discovery which is sort of this kind of thing that happens before innovation happens. You know, when we find new knowledge and were not trying to make a new product. Were actually trying to find new knowledge and maybe do something with knowledge. And i think that takes us right about 2012 when my first book came out. And and just about that time the Greenland Ice sheet started to melt quite dramatically. There were a couple of summer days where the whole ice sheet, actually, the surface of the ice sheet completely melted. And i think this was a time where Climate Change stories werent really in the news as much. And if you were following certain news organizations or news feeds, you could sort of follow that news. And it sort of 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 melting, but how we sort of had investigated it as well. And i had 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. Right. This is a place that for many of us is a tip of land we see on the inflight map on the way to europe. Could you tell us what it was im sure there are people in the room who have been to greenland, but can you tell us what it was like there . What were your first impressions, if you remember them, and what did you do there . Yeah. Well, sometimes, sometimes i flew commercial, and sometimes i had the opportunity to actually fly on some nasa flights, and there are military flights. Part of the problem with getting to greenland is you cant go directly from jfk or newark. As i said, you kind of fly over greenland, and then you fly back to greenland which is, theres a theory e that you can do it all in one day, but i dont really think you can. You have to run through the copenhagen airport at breakneck speed and maybe miss the connecting flight that goes from new york to copen payingen and copenhagen and then greenland. The first time i landed there, i remember faking a big breath taking a big breath. This is a country where theres only 56,000 people, theres no real industry. There are no trees. In many ways, its a combination and i dont say this pejoratively as at all, but its a kind of third world first world combination. Denmark has brought in a certain amount of sophistication, but where the kind of inuit traditions also exist and where this is basically, you know, pockets of villages that really feel like something from another century without plumbing, without any kind of, you know, modern conveniences. And the overwhelming feeling is that once you get out of the village of this kind of vast, beautiful empty emptiness of just rocks and lakes that go on almost forever in a way that as somebody told me there, theres so many lakes in greenland that they dont even have names. They dont theyre just too many to name. And when youre flying over them or when youre driving past them and there are no roads connecting the towns, so sometimes youre taking these small airplanes from town to town, youre really in the kind of place that feels, i think which is kind of rare today feels untouched. And how did you go about conduct i know you did Archival Research for this book and also interviews, but how did you go about conducting research in greenland . I mean, one thing i was, found a little disappointing once i started, and probably my editors did too, is that, you know, theres only a short summer season. So its not like you can just pick up and go to greenland during the winter. Its dark all the time in the winter, and they really keep it, they really keep the science part of the work to between may and august. So really if you want to go on, if you want to embed yourself with a scientific expedition or a group that are doing some work there, you really have to work a year ahead of time. And i did a variety of things. I worked a lot, you know, getting involved with different nasa projects. There were some flights over greenland where they did something called Remote Sensing where theyre trying to measure the ice sheet so, you know, maybe well talk about that in a little bit. But youre sort of flying over the ice sheet all day long. Youre actually not on the ground, youre kind of measuring it from above. I spent other time with glacologists, measuring algae that grows on it and measuring mill water streams. So i think, i mean, usually its just working a year ahead of time, trying to get involved in a variety of scientific projects. And i cant even sort of explain how many scientists are there during summer season. I call it in the book, like, the los alamos of the modern era, except everybodys studying ice rather than Nuclear Energy or atomic energy. And really not only glaciologists, but oceanographers and even, you know, those who were digging into ruins of ancient cultures. So its a real exciting place to be for science. But, again, you have to kind of work in advance. And you chose to open the book with one of those flights. I think it was in 2015. And you, i thought it was a brilliant way to open the book, because you take us along with you. You reflect on this vast expanse beneath you, and you gun to reflect on the history 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 that i was being taken by the hand and led into a very unfamiliar terrain. Could you read from the beginning of the i could. Can i borrow someones book . [laughter] i forgot, i left my book in there. Yeah, i should know this book by heart. [laughter] thank you, ill give this right back. So if i could set this up, you know, it was what was known as a nasa ice bridge flight. And i ended up, you know, with this team for about a week, and what you would do is you would show up in this 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 seats, but they had put, you know, all sorts of special equipment within the inside of it. And this plane was sort of a state of the art vehicle to measure the ice from above. 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 from above in a variety of different ways, by radar, by laser and photography too. So im going to pick up with that first day, i think, if i could. It was on my first flight for, with the nasa team on the c130, and it kind of, i think, fills in a little bit, if i could, of what we were doing. On the morning after our c130 arrived, we took the off on that first ice bridge flight. Our route from the west coast was plotted across the island due southeast toward greenlands rugged eastern coat where dark, jagged teeth jutte up from a prehistoric coast of ice. It would be a long ride. Greenland is the worlds longest island, about five times the size of california and three times the size of texas. Just over 80 of the land is covered by the central ice sheet. Though its home to a population of about 56,000 people, most of whom are descendants of the native inuit, this is the least densely populated nation on earth. Only antarctica is more barren, and only it has more ice. After we took off, we scutted through a layer of thick clouds for a half hour, but the sky soon cleared, and the white world below came into crisp resolution. The strategy is not to fly high, but to fly low, staying steady all day at 500 feet is ideal 1500 feet is ideal. There was agreement on the c130 that the ice sheet, at least from our height, tended to look at handmade paper with visible fibers and textured imperfections. But the technicians on the flight spent very little time gazing out at the scenery. With the clearing weather, they began scrutinizing their computer screens, watching sign waves and radar images and the data streaming in about the ice below. At that point i made my way through the main cabin toward the front of the plane. From there i could hop up a short ladder to the flight deck and watch through large cockpit windows that the pilot skimmed over greenlands frozen interior. For three hours we passed above this pale world until we at last approached the east coast and began trailing the snaking coarse course of big glaciers, down through mountain valleys to the oceans dark edge where they collapse and explode into the icebergstrewn chaos. Without exception what lay below was a sight of uncommon beauty and uncommon strangeness. Taking in the immense expanse of greenland from low altitude was like surveying the landscape of some kind of frozen exso planet. There was the hard blackness of the coastal mountains, soft whiteness of the ice sheet. The only color intruding was the light blue of the sky and a deeper blue from crevasses in the ice that illuminated a marine glow. Down below there were no people, no houses, no movement for hours on end there was only ice and rock, ice and rock. In my notebook i wrote, someone would think weve left no traces here at all. Many of the places below have names though, and during the course of the day and those that followed, i could piece together from my aerial view the history of an island where men and women had spent centuries charting an apparently vast emptiness. The names of explorers whod passed this way on expeditions in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of these people were fairly obscure, all of them now dead. But down below there were also remindsers of a more reminders of a more recent p place of science. Scientific outposts in the middle of the ice sheet. These camps were invisible, lost between decades of accumulating ice and snow, but near to where they once stood, i could discern a place that was still functional. A research station located in the dead center of the ice sheet at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. A cluster of buildings comprised the camp. Down below i saw a few tractors frosted white and then all signs of civilization fell away and our plane was beginning over the nothingness of the ice sheet. I had to remind myself that it wasnt actually nothingness. I recalled a story from the early 1930s about a german glaciologist who took one of the first flights over greenlands central ice, the white desert as it was sometimes called then, as a passenger in a small airplane. He had already spent a brutal winter in the center of the ice sheet. Hed also traversed it many times by dog sled. But the view from above that day was different than what heed had so far encountered. It transfixed him. He would hater write i said to myself, im looking at a landscape whose vast simplicity is nowhere to be surpassed on earth and yet also conceals a thousand secrets. I see we both have the same 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, am i well, how did you make that decision . Because i loved it as a way of opening the book. But after that you end up, you take us on a monthly chronological, not entirely but largely chronological trip through greenlands history with the explorers and scientists. How did you decide not to put yourself in . I struggled a lot, and this is sort of the inside baseball stuff for writers. I sort of had settled on writing a chronological history. But i also wanted to have some kind of way to frame that history. And i cant, you know, what keeps writers up at night is how much of the first person do i put in or not, and youre sort of thinking about this all the time, and i carried that question around with me for years. And the solution and andy, my editor, thought it worked,