Tropical Arctic by McElwain, Hill Donnelly & Glasspool
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Tropical Arctic: Lost Plants, Future Climates, and the Discovery of Ancient Greenland
By Jennifer C. McElwain, Marlene Hill Donnelly, & Ian J. Glasspool
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Despite the book’s cover illustration, some readers will enter Tropical Arctic: Lost Plants, Future Climates, and the Discovery of Ancient Greenland hoping for dinosaurs. The book is a compact, colorful account of a National Geographic-funded expedition to the east coast of Greenland to study and collect plant fossils dating from the late Triassic, and it’s full of lovely full-color artwork by Marlene Hill Donnelly. Our team travels to distant Jameson Land on the Greenland coast, a wind-scorched wasteland covered in desperate flat-low scrub and lichen, and once they’ve set up camp, they proceed to examine the surrounding area for plant fossils.
But, those impatient readers might say even so, where are the dinosaurs? Greenland in the late Triassic was a lush, verdant place, overgrown with vegetation, a place as hot and humid as the Florida swamps, and yet readers of Tropical Arctic will have to wait until page 97 (out of 138) to spot a dinosaur, and even then, it’s a lone, furtive Dracoraptor who mostly likely wandered in from Wales.
The miracle of Tropical Arctic is that it will make readers indifferent to that Dracoraptor and similar scene-stealers. “The fact that we were all sitting on top of an ancient delta floodplain,” burbles the book’s narration with the enthusiasm that runs throughout, “surrounded in our little excavation pits by leaves and twigs that had once belonged to extinct species from 200 million-year-old woodlands, highlighted the absolute wonder of paleobotany.” Such is the sheer conviction of these pages that “the wonder of paleobotany” quickly loses any hint of irony and becomes completely real.
The point here, beyond simply the interest in everything trained scientists can learn about a long-vanished landscape from poking around in dirt most people would tramp over without a second glance, deals with the present, not the past: heavy flora in a landscape speaks to large amounts of carbon locked up in those plants, and that process of carbon sequestration is very much in the news in 2021. As Tropical Arctic makes clear, the process of carbon sequestration is “one of Earth’s vital thermostats,” and humans are currently burning through carbon reserves laid down over many millions of years:
The planet has not been able to respond to our release of carbon as it did during the Jurassic. Humans are now geological-scale force acting on our entire Earth system, and our actions are altering the atmosphere and climate more rapidly than CAMP [that’s Central Atlantic Magmatic Province to you] volcanism did 200 million years ago. The Earth system has the same thermostat today, in the form of carbon sequestration by trees and other plant biomass, but it simply cannot keep pace with the sheer volume of greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere year after year.
The vanished verdure of late-Triassic Greenland, it turns out, has a great deal to tell readers about the state of their own living world. Plants are remarkably resilient things in the face of just about anything the world can throw at them (far, far more resilient than animals), but they don’t have feet or fins or wings – and if they can’t out-pace the disastrous changes going on around them, they go extinct just like anything else. In this sense, that long-lost tropical Greenland coast is a bellwether for our times, and colorful, cheerful Tropical Arctic might be the most up-beat notice of impending doom you’ll read in a year.
—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.