As you read this, clues to our planet's past – and future – are melting away… secrets draining in torrents down mountainsides… a living record of our planet's history… lost forever.

A race is taking place on Earth's glaciers, from polar regions to mountains at the top of the world. It's a contest between an international team of investigators and the effects of global warming (call it man against nature, but it's also man against time… and against a catastrophe that we created…)

The scene of the crime is Earth's glaciers, from the polar regions to the highest and most remote mountains. The culprit is global warming.

As we bicker over the significance of a 1-degree change here in the ‘flatlands', Earth's great alpine regions are undergoing 3- to 4-degree warming. Across the Rockies, the Andes, the Himalayas, the European Alps and New Zealand 's South Island , glaciers are retreating.

In these remote places, compacted layers of ice and snow hold thousands of years' worth of information about how Earth, its atmosphere - and its humans - have behaved over time… information that could hold the key to our future on this planet.

Dr. Paul Mayewski wants that information. A true adventurer, Paul is also one of the world's leading glaciologists and Director of the University of Maine 's Climate Change Institute. He's spent years leading expeditions to drill the ice caps and glaciers of Greenland and the Antarctic.

In the last few years, Paul and his colleagues have made dramatic strides, getting far more detail out of the stories that ice cores tell… including precise measurements on more than 50 chemical and biological factors… in some cases revealing even seasonal changes in a single year – , and giving us a high-definition picture of the past.

But time to capture that history is running out. Now Paul is in a race against time and temperature. That race - and the adventures along the way – are the core of SECRETS OF THE LAST GLACIERS.