The best-selling author of Your Inner Fish takes readers on a cinematic adventure to the north and south poles to uncover the secrets locked in the ice, and in the process he profoundly shifts our understanding of life on the planet and our future on it.
For three decades, the renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries through leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He's survived polar storms and faced the limits of human endurance, to explore questions of how life survived and adapted, and what our future on a changing planet may hold.

Polar regions are the epicenter for rapid change to our planet, with ice retreating, animal species moving towards the equator or going extinct, Indigenous communities confronting dramatic environmental changes, and political battles heating up for newly accessible mineral and gas resources. In the end, what happens at the poles does not stay in the poles—events there in the coming years will affect all life and every nation on the planet. The book blends travel, science, and environmental writing to deepen our understanding of animal and plant life, the history of our ice ages, the age of dinosaurs, and the history of Western exploration, and the clues meteorites preserved at the poles contain about the cosmos.

Written with characteristic enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Shubin shares lively adventure stories from the field to reveal just how far scientists will go to understand life at the poles and their meanings for the rest of life on the planet.