Gabrielle Walker

Gabrielle Walker has travelled to Antarctica many times, and Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent, published in 2013, is what came of those trips: part travel writing, part reporting on the researchers and support crews who live on the ice and the work that keeps them there. An Ocean of Air (2007) does something different, tracing the discovery of the atmosphere through the people who puzzled it out, beginning with Evangelista Torricelli and the first barometer. Walker took a doctorate in chemistry at Cambridge and lectured there and at Princeton before moving into journalism. She was climate change editor at Nature and a contributing editor at New Scientist, wrote Snowball Earth about the geologist Paul Hoffman and his argument that the planet once froze over entirely, and co-wrote The Hot Topic with Sir David King, then the British government's chief scientific adviser. She lives in London.