Presentation short abstract

This paper conceptualizes “digital glacier geographies” to explore the socio-ecological implications of the intersection of climate change, digital media technologies, and international environmental conservation in glacial fjord parks in Alaska and Chile.

Presentation long abstract

As glaciers retreat and digital media technologies advance, tidewater glaciers have become icons of climate change, drawing increasing numbers of visitors to the protected glacial fjords that contain them. These visits generate millions of digital images of glaciers in the name of climate awareness—for tourism, for land management, and for science—which together increase visibility and demand while the glaciers continue to melt, leaving local communities to grapple with newly unfolding socio-ecological challenges. This paper conceptualizes “digital glacier geographies” to understand how global online climate narratives shape local realities and uncover the unseen power dynamics behind international environmental conservation, tourism infrastructures, and media materializing in glacial fjord parks. I argue that the advancing “digital glacier” occurring simultaneously with increasing glacier melt, environmental degradation, and tourism demand redirects focus away from climate action and towards continued capitalist and colonial consumerism practices.

Alaska and Chile contain internationally-recognized glaciated wildernesses facing similar challenges balancing local community needs, ecological sustainability, growing tourism, and climate impacts. Chile’s newly-created “Ruta de los Parques” is a conservation strategy facilitated by international power relations with a colonial legacy connected to Alaska’s public lands through environmental conservation discourse. This paper compares Alaskan and Chilean parks as case studies, engaging critical geography, political ecology, and visual media analysis to highlight tensions between global conservation and local realities, and show how digital representations of glaciers and their concocted landscapes mask the structures and power dynamics that ultimately undermine environmental collaboration and conservation goals and instead perpetuate environmental injustice.