A Field Guide to Ice illustrates the frozen features of polar landscapes. The booklet lists definitions and associated photographs of land ice and glacial features, of icebergs and ice shelves, of sea ice, snow, and periglacial features.

The booklet is a self-published work of love by James Fenton. James Fenton is an ecologist and naturalist who worked as a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, and has led many ski expeditions in the Arctic, especially on Svalbard. It is not a classical fat field guide, which may be all-encompassing, but too heavy to carry with you. It is a nice color pamphlet of barely 20 pages; but those 20 pages will help you find answers to many of your first questions about ice and glacial features.

The field guide is very instructive to non-experts; it concisely defines and classifies cryogenic features. You will be able to leaf through the photos and compare them to what you see in the Arctic and Antarctic landscape. There is much less focus on the physical description of processes. For example, it misses opportunities to educate with tidbit facts; you may find a picture of snow sastrugi, but it does not explain what sastrugi tell you about the prevailing wind direction. You can find classifications of iceberg sizes, but it does not mention that four-fifths of the iceberg mass is looming underwater.

This guidebook will have competition from information now readily available on the web. The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) webpage has an online “Education Center” featuring educational pages on the cryosphere that are very comparable to this guide and bring slightly more information. More stunning imagery is available from the British Antarctic Survey Photographic Database. But the ability to get this information into the top of your pack when traveling to polar regions is just what is so useful about A Field Guide to Ice. James Fenton's inspiration for this guidebook must have come from many questions asked by his polar expedition participants over the years, and it is clear he had a ski pack or a small cabin on a polar cruise in mind when designing this field guide. There is a great value to polar travelers in carrying this booklet with them, and it makes for a good little gift to a student or friend traveling to the Arctic and Antarctic regions.