Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic

National Geographic writer Shea delivers a captivating exploration of the Arctic as climate change impacts the region’s people and wildlife. He begins by detailing a reporting trip he took to Canada’s Admiralty Inlet in 2005, where he was overwhelmed by the number of whales, seals, polar bears, and birds he saw. But since then, he explains, the landscape has changed as human-caused global warming has disrupted weather patterns, animal migrations, and how ocean currents move. Narwhals, for example, were once protected by sea ice that served as a barrier to killer whales, but as the ice has melted, the predators have moved north, where they now eat hundreds of narwhals yearly. Shea goes on to follow Arctic wolves over the rugged terrain of Ellesmere Island and track shrinking caribou herds in Canada’s Northwest Territories. He camps on frozen lakes with Inuit people in remote parts of the Arctic Circle, where ice has become less predictable, making it difficult to hunt and visit distant communities. Elsewhere, Shea turns to the past, examining how the Norse people in Greenland vanished in the 15th century, perhaps because of a different kind of climate change known as the Little Ice Age. Throughout, Shea sketches moving scenes in lyrical prose that emphasizes the interconnectedness of living things (“it is the cold that binds the many Arctics together”). Readers will be transported. (Dec.)