Three quarters of the way through Macfarlane’s dazzling book he recounts a conversation with Robert Mulvaney – a palaeoclimatologist and ice-core expert at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. After handing Macfarlane a phial containing grains of sand, Mulvaney explains that they were extracted from a kilometre deep inside a glacier and they prove that  below the ice there was once a Sahara. “They’re beautiful” says Macfarlane. “ Desert diamonds from the bottom of the world” “I can tell you are not a scientist” replies Mulvaney.  It is an unfair jibe. Scientist or not, Macfarlane serves science brilliantly well in his latest work, Underland - A Deep Time Journey. With every chapter he demonstrates his talent for explaining science and communicating the sheer wonder of the world through scientific goggles. The ambitious scope of his storytelling steps lightly from geology to linguistics to geomorphology onto folklore via nuclear physics and meteorology – all brought into focus with elegant prose and sprinklings of poetry. Like a skilled mixologist he serves up cocktails of scientific knowledge that delight and deliver more than the sum of the factual parts. Read more...