For though the Arctic journeys become boring tractor rides and the scientists are, alas, less memorable than the roguish adventurers, the drama of discovery skates the narrative forward. For as researchers better understand the ice sheet, they also realize it may be the best way to understand why temperatures are rising across the world.

Gertner, a veteran science writer for prestigious magazines and the author of a best-selling book tracing how technologies developed at Bell Labs, is in his element describing how each intellectual eureka moment led to the next. We meet Henri Bader, a Swiss glaciologist working for the Americans during the Cold War, as he and his team drill thousands of feet into the icecap, extracting tiny frozen bubbles, the gases of which help them to reconstruct the history of the climate going back more than 100,000 years. With that revelation established, Gertner is off to the races chronicling the efforts to grapple with the next logical question — How fast is the world warming? When he arrives at the present, he joins modern-day Wegeners on airplane flights that use lasers to measure the stupendous amount of meltwater pouring off Greenland each summer as they attempt to understand how all these changes will transform the world.

It is here that the book completes its last metamorphosis, from a scientific history into a submission to the ever-growing canon of climate change literature. “Big Climate Change Book” is an identity that Gertner and his publisher work mightily to claim, and yet the book felt to me too idiosyncratic, too multifaceted, to be neatly pegged there. Gertner provides us with the obligatory descriptions of the catastrophic upheavals that may ensue when Greenland’s three quadrillion tons of ice liquefy and rising seas send half a billion refugees fleeing their drowned homes. But unlike other recent books that have captured the public’s attention with excruciating play-by-plays of how the environmental apocalypse will go down or poetic laments for the ailing natural world, Gertner invests his writerly energies less in describing what is happening to Greenland’s ice than to how we know it. It is the baton race of science, with knowledge passed from one Arctic investigator to the next, that seems to captivate him most.

This is an intriguing way to frame a book about global warming, but it also raises the question: What makes this one unique? By the end of the book, his approach appealed to me for several reasons, most notably because it impressed on me like nothing I’ve read before how hard-earned climate change facts are, with statements as taken-for-granted as The earth is warming having been gleaned only at the cost of lives and decades of cumulative toil. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that Gertner never really saw his project as primarily about climate change.

Gertner spends a lot of pages in the introduction offering multiple and sprawling rationales for the existence of this book, but it seemed to me that ultimately he was seized by the same irresistible “charms and mysteries of this unknown world” that had possessed his forebears. This is a book about obsession. Nansen’s and Peary’s and Wegener’s and Bader’s and — ultimately — Gertner’s obsession. I mean that as a compliment, for despite the book’s composure, it is this wild and viral obsession that is the most compelling thing about it. And when, in the final paragraph, Gertner stands on the shore of Greenland, watching icebergs that have calved off glaciers floating past, I couldn’t help thinking that he had won a place for himself in the lineage of explorers he had been chronicling.