The Story of Ice
Exploring Weather, Chemistry, & Physics with Nature's Most Common Crystal
Published on 15. December 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
58 pages
979-8-9938762-0-7 (ISBN)
Description
Discover here how ice can grow into myriad beautiful forms while greatly influencing our weather and environment.
This 56 page book, richly illustrated with diagrams and photographs, takes you on journeys to visit many forms of ice, telling their stories. Perhaps you have heard of glaciers and icebergs, but have you visited the inside of a thunderstorm or a snowstorm? And have you ever seen needle ice, cat ice, hoar frost, or many other distinctive forms of ice? Let this book be your tour guide.
The authors, including a cloud-ice physicist who also co-wrote the popular The Story of Snow, clearly explain how these examples of ice relate to weather, chemistry, and physics.
Each page combines accurate science with real-world observations, helping young readers understand how ice affects us and our Earth.
The book includes fun facts and a parent/teacher guide that make learning about ice even more engaging. Regardless of where you live or how old you are, this book will teach you something new about the natural world around you.
Perfect for:
- A gift to give a curious kid of age 6 and up
- Classroom teachers seeking a fun way to teach kids about the physical sciences
- Parents wanting to stimulate their child's interest in science and nature
- Anyone interested in nature or winter activities
More details
Person
Ice, the atmosphere, physics, and climbing... My aim in writing is to provide some new insight. Also, I try to apply the warning given by Thomas Cardinal Wolsey long ago: "Be very very careful what you put into that head because you will never ever get it back out." In The Story of Snow, my role was to ensure it had sound science, such as showing that snow grows by vapor deposition, not by water freezing (as is widely misunderstood). In The Story of Ice, I mainly wanted to turn readers on to the many odd forms that ice can take in Nature. Anyway, I grew up in the woods of New England and the Pacific Northwest, finding frogs and climbing trees. In my teens, I shifted to climbing mountains and in school I liked physics, later focusing on ice and clouds. My studies led me to a faculty position in atmospheric science at the University of Arizona, Tucson. When someone expressed surprise that a guy in the hot desert would study ice, I told them that ice was usually only a few miles away, the direction being straight up! I later moved to Japan to run a science-journal editing company. Here I became interested in writing popular science. Now, settled back in the Seattle area, I still climb.