Bio

Mark Bowen is a writer, scientist, climber, and photographer. He grew up in suburban Westchester County, near New York City. His main interest in high school was acting—especially in modern plays.

In his early twenties, for reasons he still doesn’t quite understand, he became interested in science and decided to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1980 and a doctorate in 1985, both in physics. Then he worked in the medical industry for about twelve years, developing optical instruments and ophthalmic pharmaceuticals.

Mark has always had a love for the great outdoors—his family owns a summer home in Maine—and he has hiked, canoed and camped out for about as long as he can remember. He took up rock climbing in his mid-twenties. For the next twenty-five years, he spent virtually all his free time climbing rock, ice, or both, on most of the major crags, cliffs, and mountain ranges of North America, with a close and expanding group of friends. In the 1990s, he began traveling to remote international destinations with the British mountaineer Doug Scott. These trips resulted in his first magazine articles in Climbing. They also prompted him to begin a practice of sitting meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He had been introduced to Zen in a high school English class in 1970, but it wasn’t until he joined Scott on a trip to the formerly Buddhist kingdom of Sikkim, almost thirty years later, that he made the transition from book reading to actual meditation practice.

His three main interests—writing, climbing, and science—came together in 1997, when Natural History sent him to the top of the highest mountain in Bolivia to write an article about climatologist Lonnie Thompson, who was drilling ice cores on the mountain’s summit at the time. This life-changing experience opened Mark’s mind to the clear and present danger of global warming. After completing the article, he spent five years researching and writing Thin Ice, a book about Thompson, and joining him on two drilling expeditions to Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Thin Ice was published in 2005. It led naturally to a second book, Censoring Science, about NASA climatologist James Hansen, which was released in December 2007.

Mark lives in the Boston area with Wendy Stein and his daughter, Anna. His son, Andrew, attends college in Colorado.

Press Kit

			Click below to download Mark Bowen’s author photo (© Ed Feldmann)
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			Click below to download the jacket image for Thin Ice
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			Click below to download the jacket image for Censoring Science
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