Arcturology

Icefields (by Thomas Wharton) is a fine novel, though I'm sure I feel that way partly because it's set in Jasper which, by Canadian standards, is near my home.

Besides that, though, it's a history of the park, a lesson on glaciology, and a mystery. Much of the book takes place on and around the Arcturus glacier--based on the Columbia Icefields--and Wharton's prose made me appreciate the wondrousness of that terrain. The images of ice and water, the glacier flowing and freezing almost have an etching effect.

Anyway, instead of trying to explain one of the book's many lovely ironies, I'll give you a brief quote that I liked:

Glaciologist. I'd never heard the word before. I'd never considered there might be others like him, scientists who studied only glaciers. I thought he was the one man on earth who bothered that much with them, that this science was his alone, that he had invented it. Arcturology. The science of being distant, and receding a little every year.