The American geographer and glaciologist M Jackson is traversing the eighth most northern nations in the world to understand the cultural and societal impacts of climate change. Our planet has over 400,000 glaciers and ice caps scattered across this planet, some 5.8 million square miles of ice, and no two glaciers are ever the same. Glaciers are exceptionally diverse, fluctuating in multitudes of complex ways to local, regional, and global environmental dynamics. Fascinatingly, where there are glaciers, there are people, and the two have been interacting for the entirety of human history. But we know so little about that interaction, those human stories of glaciers. The Secret Lives of Icelandic Glaciers explores glacier diversity in Iceland, highlighting the rich social and cultural context and variability amongst glaciers and people, the conflicting and controversial plasticity and power of glaciers, and the intertwined positive and negative consequences glacier change engenders for local communities on the southeastern coast of Iceland. Investigating glaciers and people together teaches us about how human society experiences being in the world today amidst increasing climatic changes and anthropogenic transformation of all of Earth's systems.

The author's research, personal passion, and professional experience as a geographer and glaciologist at the intersection of society and climate change make her singularly well suited to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. A multitude of scholars are documenting, dissecting the causes and predicting the physical and economic consequences of climate change. That's entirely appropriate given the magnitude and complexity of the problem. But few scientists have turned their attention to the social and psychological dimensions of climate change, to how it will transform us and our cultural identities. The Secret Lives of Icelandic Glaciers has done that. What's more, and perhaps most startling about the brand new findings reported, is what this research reveals about the need for scientists to adapt their messages to the personal experiences and histories of those they're trying to reach if they hope to have influence. This work transcends the timely topic on which it's focused--human responses to the rapid disappearance of glaciers--to bear on an even greater and more urgent question: if, how, and when people differentiate truth from wishful fictions.