By any account, the impenetrable barrier of sea ice that blocked the Brendan's Isle halfway up the Labrador Coast should not have been there in late July, in what was one of the hottest summers in memory a few hundred miles to the south. Frustrated and mystified at having to turn back so early in his 1991 northbound voyage, sailor Myron Arms became determined to explain the anomaly. Three years later, having pursued this obsession from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Arms took his fifty-foot sailboat and a small crew back up the coast to test his ideas--this time making it past the Arctic Circle. The days and nights at sea are an experience of both untold vastness and the closest of quarters, of calm seas one hour and pounding gales the next. And by the time the Brendan's Isle rides the great swells of Baffin Bay, north of everything but towering icebergs, the reader can be in no doubt that, together with the crew, he is holding a finger to the very pulse of our planet. Weaving together the unfolding narrative of the voyage itself with a groundbreaking synthesis of the latest theories about Arctic ice production--and the troubling signals it may now be sending us--Riddle of the Ice is a taut and suspenseful science mystery told as captain's log. This is narrative nonfiction of the highest calibre, and it is certain to become a classic in the genre.

Riddle of the Ice

Science & Math

Arms, Myron

Earth Sciences

DOUBLEDAY

Riddle of the Ice: A Scientific Adventure into the Arctic

Anchor

The curved lines of a sailing ship resemble the inverted dome of a great cathedral, surrounded not by soot-covered buildings and crowded streets but by a vast liquid wilderness. This physical and symbolic connection is at the thematic heart of Cathedral of the World, a collection of essays in which writer and professional small-boat sailor Myron Arms sets out on a journey both physical and spiritual, seeking to explore what he calls "the primal spaces" and to articulate the sailor's age-old quest to understand his world and himself. Arms, author of the Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice, weaves the experiences of four decades at sea into a series of reflections that range across half a lifetime and thousands of ocean miles. During these journeys, he takes readers to some of the last wild places on Earth, climbing the hills of the North Atlantic in a full gale, watching the flight of seabirds, listening to the night-breath of whales, and pondering the questions that all such encounters inspire. What John Muir did for western forests, what Edward Abbey did for the desert, Arms now does for the ocean. In a voice that is reverent, impassioned, and clear-sighted, he celebrates the wilderness he has come to love, mourns its wounds, and demonstrates for all of us its power to heal.

Cathedral of the World: Sailing notes for a blue planet

Sports & Outdoors

Water Sports

The curved lines of a sailing ship resemble the inverted dome of a great cathedral, surrounded not by soot-covered buildings and crowded streets but by a vast liquid wilderness. This physical and symbolic connection is at the thematic heart of Cathedral of the World, a collection of essays in which writer and professional small-boat sailor Myron Arms sets out on a journey both physical and spiritual, seeking to explore what he calls "the primal spaces" and to articulate the sailor's age-old quest to understand his world and himself. Arms, author of the Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice, weaves the experiences of four decades at sea into a series of reflections that range across half a lifetime and thousands of ocean miles. During these journeys, he takes readers to some of the last wild places on Earth, climbing the hills of the North Atlantic in a full gale, watching the flight of seabirds, listening to the night-breath of whales, and pondering the questions that all such encounters inspire. What John Muir did for western forests, what Edward Abbey did for the desert, Arms now does for the ocean. In a voice that is reverent, impassioned, and clear-sighted, he celebrates the wilderness he has come to love, mourns its wounds, and demonstrates for all of us its power to heal.

Cathedral of the World: Sailing Notes for a Blue Planet

Religion & Spirituality

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Cathedral of the World: Sailing Notes for a Blue Planet (Thorndike Large Print Inspirational Series)

Travel

Travel Writing

G.K.Hall & Co.

As the last of the northern cod disappeared from the fishing banks of eastern North America during the waning years of the 20th century, more than just fish faced the threat of extinction. In communities all around the island of Newfoundland, thousands of fishermen and their families suddenly found themselves confronted by a similar threat.Servants of the Fish is the story of these people, who are at once the perpetrators and the victims of this event. As he did in his best-selling Riddle of the Ice, Arms employs the drama of the voyage to bring readers face to face with the people and the geography of the tale he tells. It is the tale of a particular time and place. Yet it is also an allegory of sorts-about predators and prey, about greed and denial, and about our collective ability as human beings to destroy natural systems once thought to be infinite.

Servants of the Fish: A Portrait of Newfoundland After the Great Cod Collapse

History

Americas

Upper Access

From the fiords of northern Labrador to the icefields of western Greenland, from the outports of Newfoundland to the tiny fishing villages of Iceland and the Faroe Isles, best-selling author and lifelong sailor Myron Arms chronicles the experience of two-and-a-half decades of voyaging into some of the most remote destinations on Earth.Presented as a series of sixteen personal essays,True North is at once a tale of white-knuckled adventure, a celebration of natural places, and a quest for contact with the planet we live on. Thought-provoking and environmentally savvy, True North expresses one man's fierce determination to encounter the natural world, to live deliberately within it, to strive to minimize one's footprint upon it, and to bear witness to it before it is altered irretrievably-before it is lost. Also by the author: Riddle by the Ice 9780385490931, Cathedral of the World9780385494762, Servants of the Fish9780942679298

True North: Journeys into the Great Northern Ocean

Biological Sciences

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Books by Arms, Myron