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A fascinating celebration of how ice has shaped human existenceIn 1946 a young atmospheric scientist named Bernard Vonnegut made a significant discovery. It had already been shown that clouds could be made to produce snow or rain by “seeding” them with dry ice, but Vonnegut proved that an even more dramatic and persistent effect could be achieved with silver iodide. The following year, he encouraged his struggling younger brother to join the same lab, not as a scientist but as a copywriter. It was almost 20 years later that Kurt Vonnegut published his satirical novel Cat’s Cradle, inspired by what he’d seen, in which a tyrant unleashes a synthetic form of ice (“ice-nine”) that causes any water it touches to freeze instantly. The novel does not end happily for the planet or its inhabitants.Ranging from the last ice age to the Anthropocene, Max Leonard’s beguiling history considers the nature of ice as well as its place “in the popular imagination, how it has inspired literature and poetry, and therefore how we might be being diminished as it disappears”. Its genesis was an experience of jarring but everyday incongruity: sitting in a pub one summer’s evening, ice clinking in his drink, Leonard found himself watching TV footage of “meltwater disgorging into the seas of Greenland”. He was struck by an urge to reconcile what was on the screen with what was in his glass. “My hope is that by bringing ice into a more intimate sphere … the catastrophe happening in remote places will become more tangible – that we might feel more keenly what is being lost.” But A Cold Spell is less an elegy and more a celebration of human ingenuity and adaptability. Ice, for Leonard, is a “radically disruptive substance”, a source of terror and entrapment, yes, but also a matrix of revelation. Continue reading...