Climate change in Eurasian Arctic shelf seas : centennial ice cover observations /

This brief, specialized, technical book by Frolov and colleagues (all, Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, Russia) can be used by environmental science students and professionals in the field, especially those monitoring ice caps. The text is basically written in the style of a review article, and could have easily been published in a scientific journal. The data harvested from the Eurasian Arctic shelf seas might be very useful for scientists, considering that some of it has been collected for over a century. The book would have benefitted from more figures to illustrate the text; some figures need improvement to allow readers to see the scales. A chapter thoroughly discussing the data analysis techniques used would have been helpful, since the data makes up the book's core. The conclusions are too strong, some are speculative, and others are not substantiated. This automatically diminishes the value of the data, and induces a loss of scientific credibility. Many cited references are in Russian, limiting readers interested in further investigating some of the subjects described. The complexity of the problem, as rightly mentioned by the authors, requires a thorough study of the correlation of many research fields to reach nonspeculative conclusions in this highly interdisciplinary field. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals in environmental sciences. A. M. Hamza University of New Brunswick