Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson

Huey and his colleagues determined which writers to bring to campus, with five to six writers being brought in for the series each year. This was Huey’s first year organizing the GV Writers Series following his predecessor, Todd Kaneko. with an introduction of the authors by event coordinator and associate professor of the Writing Department, Amorak Huey. Here, GVSU faculty authors Beth Peterson and Caitlin Horrocks did a book reading and signing for coworkers, students and the general public. 3 in the Multi-purpose Room of the Mary Idema Pew Library. Peterson's work veers into numerous terrains, orbiting the idea of vanishing and the taxonomies of loss both in an unstable world and in our individual lives.The third event of this school year’s Grand Valley State University Writers Series took place Monday, Feb. It is a brilliant synthesis of science, storytelling, and research in the spirit of essayists like Robert Macfarlane, John McPhee, and Joni Tevis. Her search for a noted glacier museum in Norway led to news that the renowned building had set on fire in the middle of the night before and burned to the ground.ĭispatches from the End of Ice is part science, part lyric essay, and part research reportage-all structured around a series of found artifacts (a map, a museum, an inventory, a book) in an attempt to understand the idea of disappearance. She spoke with historians, guides, and scientists in search of answers. She visited a cryonics institute, an ice core lab, a wunderkammer, Wittgenstein's cabin, and other museums and libraries. Peterson's effort to make sense of these losses led to travels across Scandinavia, Italy, England and back to the United States.

Finally, Peterson took a harrowing forty-foot fall while ice climbing. The glacier was melting at breakneck pace, and people she knew vanished: her professor went missing while summiting a volcano in Japan, and a friend wandered off a mountain trail in Norway. It is science wrought with mystery, and for Beth Peterson it became personal.Ī few months after Peterson moved to a tiny village on the edge of Europe's largest glacier, things began to disappear. These changing landscapes and the public discourse surrounding them are changing fast. The future of the world's ice is at a critical juncture marked by international debate about climate change and almost daily reports about glaciers and ice shelves breaking, oceans rising, and temperatures spiking across the globe.

Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson