An urgent field report from Antarctica includes shocking evidence of climate change.

The Antarctic Peninsula is currently warming six times faster than the average rate for the planet, a rise in temperature more sustained than in any other known region of abrupt climate change on Earth. Although it may seem barren, this icy continent is a vital part of the Earth's ecosystem and central to the processes of global warming.

The Ferocious Summer is Meredith Hooper's firsthand account of the effects of climate change on Antarctica. For one summer, Hooper lived and worked with scientists observing the summer population of AdÈlie penguins nesting at Palmer Station, the smallest of America's three Antarctic research bases. For Hooper, Palmer's penguins offered a route to the complex business of Earth's changing climate. The Antarctic Peninsula was warming fast. Hooper questioned why and wondered what scientists were doing to understand it. The daily lives of Palmer's few thousand AdÈlie penguins became central evidence of global change. Pieces of the climate change puzzle-a jigsaw of complex interlocking pieces, with bits jumbled and missing-began clattering into place.

Based on daily diaries, acute personal observations, and interviews with Antarctica's international community of researchers, The Ferocious Summer is a fascinating and alarming report from the frontlines of global warming.

Meredith Hooper is an award-winning author of more than sixty fiction and nonfiction books for children. She is also the author of several books of nonfiction for adults. She is an expert and lecturer on Antarctica, as well as a committee member for the U.K. Antarctic Heritage Trust. She lives in London.

Meredith Hooper's profile page

"The Ferocious Summer chronicles the effects of climate change on Adelie penguins in Antarctica. The book is sobering, though the prose is workmanlike, and the narrative occasionally drifts along with the bits of ice shelf the author describes."

Globe & Mail

"Hooper's book is a chatty, day-by-day recounting of activities at the research station. It gives a vivid sense of living in sardine-tin conditions at the edge of an unruly ocean, in a landscape monumental in its isolating grandeur."

Toronto Star