Greenland: a remote, mysterious island five times the size of California but with a population of just 56,000. The ice sheet that covers it is 700 miles wide and 1500 miles long, and is composed of nearly three quadrillion tons of ice. For the last 150 years, explorers and scientists have sought to understand Greenland--at first hoping that it would serve as a gateway to the North Pole, and later realizing it contained essential information about our climate. Locked within its vast and frozen white desert are some of the most profound secrets about our planet and its future. Greenland's ice doesn't just tell us where we've been. More urgently, it tells us where we're headed. In The Ice at the End of the World, Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of the earth's last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory. The history of Greenland's ice begins with the heroic explorers who arrived here at the turn of the 20th century--first on foot, then on skis, then on motorized sleds--and embarked on grueling expeditions that took as long as a year and often ended in frostbitten tragedy. Their original goal was simple: to conquer Greenland's seemingly infinite interior. Yet their efforts eventually gave way to scientists whose aim was to pull up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of earth's past, going back hundreds of thousands of years. Today, scientists are deploying every technological tool available to uncover the secrets of this frozen island. As Greenland's ice melts and runs off into the sea, it not only threatens to affect hundreds of millions of people who live in coastal areas. It will also have drastic effects on ocean currents and weather systems, economies and migration patterns. Gertner chronicles the unfathomable hardships, amazing discoveries, and scientific achievements of the Arctic's explorers and researchers with a transporting, deeply intelligent style--and a keen sense of what this work means for the rest of us. The melting ice sheet in Greenland is, in a way, an analog for time. It contains the past. It reflects the present. It can also tell us how much time we might have left.