"Slowly -- inch by inch, foot by foot -- the ice crept southward. From the far north, great sheets of ice spread out, swallowing the lands." So begins Patricia Lauber's vivid account of the Ice Age.

Eventually a quarter of all the land on earth was covered with ice thousands of feet thick. In North America, the massive ice sheet reached as far south as the spots where St. Louis and Cincinnati now stand. What caused this great invasion of ice? For more than a hundred years, scientists have sought to explain this baffling mystery.

This scientific story includes the adventures of Louis Agassiz, who camped on glaciers and descended into crevasses in his pioneering study of the Ice Age. It also covers the work of the modern scientists who do their research at the South Pole -- or aboard a floating ice island in the Arctic Ocean.

Will the Ice Age come again? In this exciting book, the author tells of the progress scientists have made toward solving the mystery of the Ice Age -- past and future.

-- From the book.