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Inside sleeve:

‘’A foraminifer shell is the size of a grain of sand; on the beach it looks like a grain of sand. And yet the oxygen atoms in such shells at the bottom of the sea record the advance and retreat of mile-thick ice sheets across the face of the continents, and thus the complete alteration of our world that has taken place at regular intervals over the past million years. The whole planet in a grain of sand – it seems too poetic to be a scientific truth. But iti is true, and when Shackleton announced his reults at a meeting at Lamont in 1972, Imbrie and others in the audience wanted to cheer. "We were sitting there and Shackleton announces this and immediately everybody says ’By God we’ve got it,‘" Imbrie recalls. "We’ve got like a golden key."