The Two-Mile Time Machine by Richard Alley, Princeton, £15.95, ISBN
0691004935
TEN thousand years ago, the great thaw that ended the last ice age suddenly
flooded the world. It took just a few years for mountains to become islands and
plains to turn to seas. Since then, luckily for us, the global climate has
altered only sluggishly. Any changes have occurred over decades if not
centuries, giving us time to adapt or migrate.
This state of affairs is exceptional, it turns out. Cores drilled through the
ice sheet shrouding Greenland revealed that in the more distant past our
planet’s climate…
