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- Convenors:
-
Sophie Elixhauser
(University of Vienna)
Anna-Maria Walter (LMU Munich)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- North & Nordicity
- Location:
- Room 18
- Sessions:
- Monday 19 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
How do people make sense of and engage with melting snow and ice characterizing our world today? Through a multitude of storied and creative approaches, this panel seeks to tease out what we can learn about the interaction with our frozen environment, and climatic entanglements more broadly.
Long Abstract:
Global climate and environmental changes characterize our world today. Glaciers are melting, ocean levels are rising, snow cover in winter is increasingly volatile, snowlines and precipitation patterns are shifting, permafrost is thawing and the ground is gradually becoming unstable. These are just some examples of the changing cryosphere with respective consequences. How do people make sense of and engage with melting snow and ice?
While huge glacier masses have long been considered as ‘frozen in time’, they now graphically demonstrate that they are continuously in motion; history is happening in front of our eyes. A look at local narratives and memories gives insight into the long-durée of dealing with transformations of the cryosphere. Through material and multi-sensory perceptions people have developed different practices and strategies to relate to (or un-relate from) frozen matter.
To bring together past experiences and contemporary mitigation and adaptation measures, we invite contributions about Indigenous perspectives of snow, ice, and glaciers; environmental memories and narratives; the history of academic research on ice and snow; scientific surveying technologies, such as remote sensing; geopolitical interests in (vanishing) bodies of ice; as well as examples of alternative practices of engaging with snow and ice, through art, sport, (new age) animism, or storytelling.
Through this multitude of storied and creative approaches, this panel on the melting cryosphere seeks to tease out what we can learn about the interaction with our frozen environment, and climatic entanglements more broadly.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 19 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
What makes glaciers “Instagram-able”? This question about the fascination of the cryosphere to tourists seems to be related to present day smartphone and social media society, but will be traced back also to the Belle Époque, when bourgeois tourists posed on or in front of glaciers for a photograph.
Paper long abstract:
What makes glaciers “Instagram-able”? This question about the fascination of the cryosphere to tourists seems to be related to present day smartphone and social media society, but can be traced back to the Belle Époque, when bourgeois tourists in the Alps, in Norway or in the Rocky Mountains posed on or in front of glaciers for a photograph. This paper aims to explore the attraction of glaciers to alpine tourist from the late 19th century onwards. Looking at the example of the Swiss mountains, glaciers even became the drivers to construct cog railways to altitudes never reached before. In this way, wealthy tourists could just stop near the glacier, admire a spectacular view, and pose in front of this scenery or even on the ice itself. Photographers such as Arthur Gabler from Interlaken (canton of Bern) made a big business with accompanying these tourists for a professional photo. He also sold these photographs as postcards to send them home from the Bernese Oberland. In this way, an attitude similar to our today’s “Instagram society” can be observed. Based on a visual environmental history approach using photographs and poster advertisements combined with written evidence, this paper tries to shed a light on the development of human-glacier relationships for the last 140 years. However, as an outlook, it will also ask how this alpine tourism infrastructure constructed for glacier experiences will cope with a future, when the glaciers have shrunk or totally vanished.
Paper short abstract:
Climate change is a powerful story in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. By approaching climate change as a discourse, we compare dominant narratives about glaciers and avalanches with local counter-stories.
Paper long abstract:
Climate change is a powerful story in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, in the high Arctic. While natural science agrees on accelerating climate change with profound environmental impacts, this article unpacks the multidimensionality of the topic locally. By approaching climate change as a discourse, we explore the reception and reproduction of the dominant climate change discourse, and compare it to other local stories about climate change and adaptation. With this we aim to contribute to the growing field of reception studies in anthropology (De Wit & Haines 2021, Rudiak-Gould 2011). Examining narratives about snow avalanches and glaciers, we find counter-stories that nuance and contest dominant stories, pointing to over-simplification, sensationalism and the (mis)use of the climate discourse for other purposes. We argue that such counter-stories must be listened to in order to move in the direction of fair, inclusive, and transparent climate change politics.
Paper short abstract:
This paper approaches thawing ice and permafrost in Arctic Canada as "solid fluids", and considers the process of their transformation in the context of wider sociocultural and politico-economic dynamics.
Paper long abstract:
Seasonal and historical transformations of ice and permafrost suggest that the Mackenzie Delta in Arctic Canada can be understood as a solid fluid. The concerns and practices of delta inhabitants show that fluidity and solidity remain important attributes in a solid fluid delta. They are significant not as exclusive properties, but as relational qualities, in the context of particular human projects and activities. Indigenous philosophies of ‘the land’ and Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘tempo’ may help to illustrate the predicament of living in a world that is solid and fluid rhythmically, and in relation to particular practices. Economic, political, sociocultural and physical transformations can all be experienced as both solid and fluid, depending on the degree to which they resonate with people’s purposes. In a world where everything seems to be changed and changing, solidity and fluidity may best be seen as indications of relative differences in tempo.
Paper short abstract:
Considering Andreas Kornerup’s glacial watercolours and scientific drawings we explore an environmental art history that thinks with glaciers to tell stories and centre visual histories that might help us understand and re-imagine our past, present, and future relationships with ice.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the glacial watercolours and scientific drawings made by the Danish geologist Andreas Nicolaus Kornerup of the glacier Sioqqap Sermia, Greenland in 1878. These pictures, previously used only as illustrations, offer a shift from symbolic strategies to scientific familiarity and indicate an interdisciplinary turn in art historical visual analysis. As co-authors based within the fields of art history and glaciology, respectively, we argue that an ecocritical art history of ice requires active engagement with interdisciplinary collaboration to untangle their unique stories and perspectives. Writing collaboratively on the visual history of glaciers involves adapting scientific terminology to the processes of visual analysis, incorporating western and Indigenous perspectives, and recognising the glacier’s own agency within its respective social, cultural, and environmental contexts. Glaciers continue to be entangled with fantastical views of the sublime, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global geopolitics. Today, glaciers are often framed by the urgency of the climate crisis and provide some of the most visible signs of change. Our paper is, however, not limited by an endangered glacier narrative, instead we bring together exploratory narratives, scientific studies, environmental history, and visual analysis of historic pictures to elucidate the particularities of glacial environments; its histories, characteristics, and aesthetics. With this, we propose an environmental art history that thinks with glaciers to tell stories and centre visual histories that might help us understand and re-imagine our past, present, and future relationships with glaciers and the cryosphere.
Paper short abstract:
This specific work presents the case studies of three generations how they praise and honor glaciers.
Paper long abstract:
Gilgit Baltistan is considered the hub of glaciers since the snow-covered mountain ranges of Himalaya, Karakorum and Hindukush are situated in the region. Though a lot of work has been done on the glaciers of Gilgit Baltistan but an important aspect of customary laws and rituals of celebrating, honoring and praising glaciers that is directly linked with the local narrative of the spirituality of glaciers is missing in the archives. The inhabitants of GB consider glacier as a living spiritual entity which is not 'nature' only. This paper can help us consider what the environment is (in a fundamental ontological way) in relation to what it means to people. This specific work presents the case studies of three generations how they praise and honor glaciers. Firstly, the story of a local spiritual figure (111 years old) explains his 85 years journey of meditation with glaciers and how he witnessed the impact of climate change on glaciers in all those years. Secondly, a political figure explains the struggle of locals in saving the glaciers and thirdly, the story of a young local musician highlights how the younger generation give tribute to glaciers by celebrating ‘high- altitude’ music festivals.
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents a project that will explore snow as memory, meaning and materiality in the light of global warming in Sweden.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents a project that will explore snow as memory, meaning and materiality in the light of global warming in Sweden. The project's starting point is that the changing materiality of snow due to global warming affects how people relate to and engage with snow. This might also lead to that older generations have different memories and experiences of snow than younger ones. “Snow talk” can be seen as connected to the temporality of snow as memories might carry associations to future. The snows changing materiality tells a story of what kind of snow (or lack of snow) is to expect.
The aim of the project is to investigate how snow as a cultural phenomenon is understood and renegotiated in relation to climate change. This is done by doing a cultural analysis of snow as a phenomenon in contemporary Sweden. Memory, meaning and materiality will be the analytical themes that form the focus of the study. The material will consist of questionnaires, interviews, newspaper articles and snow-related artefacts (for example plastic snowmen and similar Christmas decorations). The focus for this paper is memories collected via interviews and questionnaires. By exploring and collecting people’s memories of snow, questions can be asked on how past snow play a role in the understanding of present snow. What does snow mean to people and how is snow given meaning in a time of global warming?
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic work with cryosphere scientists who study glacial life, this presentation makes a critical analysis of the model with which the West is educated today about environmental change, particularly the transformations of ice, normally conceive as pure, solid and inert.
Paper long abstract:
Despite its relevance in the constitution of the Anthropocene, the bulk of the world's population contemplates the properties of glacial ice and its transformations in a disaffected way. Such would be the case of the mayority of the inhabitants of the urban world, accustomed to imagine cryogenic processes through the comfort of their screens or in the asepsis of their refrigerators. Curiously, this would coincide with how science defines the new geological epoch as a global reality, therefore indifferent to the transformations of the specific territories in which it unfolds. On a daily basis, this abstraction would coincide, in turn, with the way in which children are normally educated about states of matter, inspired by an idealised conception of ice as pure, solid and inert. This understanding would contrast with contemporary scientific knowledge of the cryosphere marked, among others things, by the presence of life. Based on ethnographic work with cryosphere scientists who study glacial life, this presentation makes a critical analysis of the model with which the West is educated today about environmental change, an aspect identified as critical to advance climate action.
Paper short abstract:
Glacial Hauntologies is an interdisciplinary collaboration between glaciologists and artists working to translate, subvert, and repurpose tools from a multitude of disciplines to explore geophysical data and glaciological archives related to Thwaites Glacier and the Laurentide Ice Sheet.
Paper long abstract:
Glacial Hauntologies is an interdisciplinary collaboration between early-career scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Consortium (ITGC) and two New England-based environmental artists. Interweaving glaciology with artistic practice, we translate, subvert, and repurpose tools from many disciplines to explore geophysical data and glaciological archives. On Thwaites Glacier - one of West Antarctica’s vulnerable outlet glaciers - we work within a team of scientists to record radar, seismic, magnetotelluric, and gravity data to learn about the shallow crust structures, subglacial topography, and the glacier's response to stresses. In New England, on the bed of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, we look up through the spectre of ice that last covered the landscape 10-18,000 years ago. We are interested in how ice - past ice, current melt, and future glacial disappearances - reoccurs as a persistent hauntology across 21st century landscapes, scientific data, and day-to-day life.
Working across print, sound, textile, movement, and math, our work confronts male-dominated, colonial histories of Antarctic research by centering expansive, embodied, collaborative practices that create alternative relationships to, histories of, and ways of doing research about glacial change. This work includes recordings of dripping meltwater overlayed with sonified seismic data, large-scale, sewn cyanotype fabric collages, zines of body outlines for recording deep field experiences, interactive glaciological data presentations, and other multimedia work.
This paper will detail work from this collaboration, propose a framework for intersectional, transdisciplinary creative research, and discuss the outcomes of doing integrated artistic and scientific research about Thwaites Glacier.
Paper short abstract:
Frozen environments often leave powerful impressions on the scientists studying them. I analyse how such impressions shaped the study and understanding of snow crystals in the 19th and 20th centuries, and reflect on how a changing cryosphere might also change the way we study and understand it.
Paper long abstract:
Nowadays, much scientific attention on the cryosphere is directed at the vulnerability of massive bodies, like melting glaciers or shrinking sea ice. However, the historiography of academic research on snow and ice has largely overlooked studies of the “small ice” that makes up the cryosphere, notably snowflakes (or snow crystals). In this paper, I argue that knowledge of these particular forms of snow and ice has been greatly shaped by the places in which they have been studied. I do so by analysing the aesthetic experiences of observers who studied snowflakes in “high places”, namely in mountain and Polar regions, during the 19th and 20th centuries. Aesthetic experiences refer to the sensory impressions gained from and emotional responses to one’s surroundings, such as the perceived beauty of the snow, or the pleasure of observing it.
Ultimately, this paper elevates the role of space in the history of modern cryo-science. This is becoming ever more prescient as our cryosphere is transforming. Cryo-scientists are deeply engaged in studying the effects of melting ice or changing weather patterns on the Earth’s climate, but how will these changes affect the way we study the cryosphere in the first place? Decreasing access to snow and ice; an increasing reliance on remote sensing; fewer opportunities for chance encounters with snow. Understanding how scientists engage with their fields is necessary for understanding the effects of a changing climate on the sciences that study it.
Paper short abstract:
As the global cryosphere declines, some have proposed technoscientific interventions to mitigate the thaw. Several of these projects have however run into staunch (indigenous-led opposition). This paper will explore the different perspectives that led to the two most prominent such controversies.
Paper long abstract:
As the global cryosphere declines, some have proposed technoscientific interventions to mitigate this thawing. Such proposals are known under varius names, but are most commonly referred to as geoengineering, climate intervention, or climate repair. These projects are often designed by scholars affiliated with prominent "Western" research institutions, but would primarily be deployed far away from where they are located, often on indigenous territories, and have several times sparked major indigenous-led protest. This paper will briefly mention two such protests, one against the Harvard-led SCoPEx project in Sweden, and one against the Arctic Ice Project in Alaska, and explain the fundamentally different ways of seeing the environment and human-nature relationships that underlie these conflicts.