Ice Explorers

For decades, one especially daring traveler has set off into the wilderness with little more than a sense of adventure. Dick Griffith is an Alaska legend who made his name with a string of fearless feats: rafting down the Green and Colorado Rivers, skiing solo across the icy Northwest Passage, and being the first nonnative to drop into the treacherous Barranca Del Cobre in Mexico.

The first full biography of Griffith, Canyons and Ice offers a rare look at the man behind the soaring achievements and occasionally death-defying moments.

On the North Pole of Pluto there stands an enigma: a huge circle of standing blocks of ice, built on the pattern of Earth's Stonehenge - but 10 times the size, standing alone at the farthest reaches of the Solar System. What is it? Who came there to build it? The secret lies, perhaps, in the chaotic decades of the Martian Revolution, in the lost memories of those who have lived for centuries.

Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia’s greatest Antarctic explorer. On 2 December 1911, he led an expedition from Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below, 2000 miles of which had never felt the tread of a human foot. After setting up Main Base at Cape Denision and Western Base on Queen Mary Land, he headed east on an extraordinary sledging trek with his companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz. After tragedy struck, Mawson found himself all alone, 160 miles from safety, with next to no food.

Sprague Theobald, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and expert sailor with over 40,000 offshore miles under his belt, always considered the Northwest Passage - the sea route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific - the ultimate uncharted territory. Since Roald Amundsen completed the first successful crossing of the fabled Northwest Passage in 1906, only 24 pleasure craft have followed in his wake.

Der Mann, der durch den Eisring fuhr! Die unglaubliche Geschichte von William Morris erstmals auf Deutsch! Die offizielle Geschichte seiner Reise tauchte zum ersten Mal als Manuskript im 19. Jahrhundert auf. Das Originalmanuskript galt jahrzehntelang als verschollen. Später tauchte es in Argentinien in Privatbesitz wieder auf. Erzählungen nach existieren nur eine Handvoll Abschriften. Heute besitzt der Autor Max Ehrenberg eine Abschrift des Originals. In offiziellen Quellen wie Wikipedia gibt es keine Berichte über William Morris.

One man’s “curiously thrilling joyride” of travelogue, history, and climatology, across a planet on the brink of cataclysmic transformation. As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the...