Edmund Blair Bolles

The Ice Finders

How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age

In the middle of the nineteenth century three diverse men discovered and named the Ice Ages. The heroes of the tale are an explorer-poet, Elisha Kent Kane (1820-1857), who spent two years trapped on Greenland's north coast, the renowned Swiss professor-author-lecturer, Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), and the Scottish geologist (and master politician) Charles Lyell (1797-1875). With their investigations, these adventurers changed our understanding of natural history and transformed Geology into the foundational science that supports biology, paleontology, oceanography, and, of course, glaciology.