Tropical Arctic: The Science and Art of Lost Landscapes

A visit to a tropical artic of 250 million years ago, when Greenland was green.   By looking at Earth's past, in this case a recreation of a tropical Greenland, we see a glimpse of the future of our warming planet.

The origin of this visually-driven book was a simple question: "What was the color of a fossilized leaf?" The answer took a collaboration between two paleobotanists, Jennifer McElwain and Ian Glasspool, and the artist Marlene Hill-Donnelly and years of exploration to uncover fossils, to analyze them at a microscopic level, and to recreate them from models and painting.

The authors describe their work as recreating a conversation from a single whisper.

In this book, they have recreated 26 conversations—or views of a Greenland from 250 million years ago.

Readers of the book will be the first to see a Triassic Greenland, learn from a visual catalog of extinct plants, and explore three reconstructed landscapes to understand our planet's story of environmental upheaval, mass extinction, and resilience.

In the process, they will enjoy a front-row seat to the scientific adventure of life in the field, analyzing fossils and learning to ward off polar bear attacks.

The book ends with an important message for our time of climate change—that the biosphere can adapt, but we have to give it time and we can't expect it to ever look the same.