The Arctic, Frozen in Time

Just days before the world rang in the New Year, satellites detected a floating chunk of sea ice larger than the island of Manhattan that had calved off the Ayles Ice Sheet, which caps Ellesmere Island in the northernmost reaches of Canada. Two days before that, on December 27, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because the iconic bear's habitat is melting away. The Inuit are giving up their dog teams because the ice is too fragile for sleds to slide safely. And consider this: As the ice disappears, our single most valuable climate record, the ice cores of antiquity, vanishes with it -- a calamity for climatologists and geologists that is akin to losing the Library of Alexandria. Other scientific endeavors will suffer too. This 20,000-year-old mammoth head, shown here preserved in a subterranean Siberian laboratory, is likely to deteriorate as temperatures rise. Its prehistoric kin will emerge from the permafrost only to decay before researchers get the chance to glean their invaluable secrets. In White Paradise: Journeys to the North Pole (Abrams, $40), French explorer and photographer Francis Latreille renders this vast, varied, and dynamic world in portraits and landscapes that, taken together, impart a sense of bittersweet longing for a threatened place our children may soon know only through history books.