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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines associations between frozen woolly mammoths and refrigeration technology. Precisely how permafrost prevented the decomposition of soft tissues for thousands of years was a primary point of investigation, and the Arctic was described as a natural refrigerator.

Paper long abstract:

Connections between permafrost-preserved woolly mammoths and refrigeration technology began in the 1850s and persisted into the 1950s. As steam-powered refrigerators were developed in Great Britain circa 1850, popular discourse habitually recalled the first frozen mammoth collected from Siberia in 1806 as a way of explaining to British audiences the freezing process and its impact on animal bodies. This mammoth, these narratives claimed, demonstrated how the frozen Arctic ground preserved the mammoth's body for thousands of years--just as artificial refrigerators preserved the flesh of recently slaughtered sheep and cattle for human consumption. Thus naturalizing the novel technology, the Siberian mammoth was made to assuage consumer anxiety around frozen meat. When, in 1943, gold miners unearthed the head, trunk, and foreleg of a baby mammoth, the American Museum of Natural History solidified the association between artificial refrigeration and permafrost mammoths in text and on display. The diorama surrounding the display of the animal, and an article accompanying it in Natural History were both entitled “Nature’s Deep Freeze.” The mammoth itself was presented to the public inside a replica of a mid-20th-century home freezer, while the Natural History article elaborated the longstanding analogy of the Arctic as a natural refrigerator.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation shows how Swiss and US scientists remade Swiss avalanche science in the Rocky Mountains in the mid-twentieth century. They adapted it to local nature and also to the aesthetics of wilderness and the economics of skiing, changing in turn the meanings of snow in North America.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1930s, investors, municipalities, and states in the Western United States began to develop ski resorts. They hired Swiss experts, such as engineer and alpinist André Roch, to give advice on managing snow and its risk: avalanches. On his frequent visits in the 1930s and 1940s, Roch drew on decades of avalanche research in Switzerland. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Swiss foresters had studied snow, terrain, and vegetation—relying heavily on local knowledge—to map and prevent avalanches. However, this knowledge was in a precarious state. Not only was Roch in the US faced with the question of whether this knowledge was transferable to local conditions, at home, he was part of a dispute over the best approach to studying avalanches. Engineers, like Roch, and physicists made the case for turning the research focus to the material properties of snow and ice—with success. In 1942, the Swiss state funded the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research, dedicated to this line of research, in Davos. It quickly became the center for the science of snow, and US researchers paid frequent visits. Drawing on Roch’s personal papers and scientific and administrative archives in Colorado and Oregon, this presentation shows how Roch and his US interlocutors remade avalanche science in the Rocky Mountains. It argues that they did not only need to adapt the science to local nature but also to the aesthetics of snowy mountain wilderness and the economics of skiing in the US, changing in turn the meanings of snow in North America.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper outlines generational changes in how communities in Canada and the UK understand, relate to, and narrate winter weather. Drawing on a range of oral histories and archives, I show how participant’s memories of winter are shaped by both their local community and wider popular culture.

Paper long abstract:

This paper outlines generational changes in how communities and individuals understand, relate to, and narrate winter weather. Drawing on a range of oral histories and archival records from Canada and the UK, the paper introduces the main narrative-forms that people use to recount their memories of the cold, snow and other winter conditions. In doing so, I show that participant’s memories of winter are shaped by both their immediate local community and wider popular culture. In particular, I demonstrate how popular media forecasting and reporting on specific winter storms has influenced an outsized cultural footprint, which is reflected in the memories collated as part of this research.

By exploring the differences in memories from respondents in different climatological locales, the paper highlights the importance of not only place, but also family and community in informing individual’s expectations of winter extremities. I then use these nuanced, inconsistent and messy memories of winters past to highlight the contingent and plural ways that people and communities conceive of their climate. In closing, I ask whether media emphasis on the scientific credentials of climate change, has come at the expense of place-specific narratives and the emotive attachment they confer, which is so crucial for affecting behavioral change?

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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates gradually shifting narratives in the aftermath of extreme climate events in the 1816 “year without a summer”: from narratives of global cooling, arctic ice break-up and glacier growth, to the 20th-Century re-evaluation of Tambora’s volcanic activity as cause.

Paper long abstract:

The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused wet, frigid weather across the northern hemisphere that resulted in years of crop failures, summer snows, widespread famine in Europe, and a ‘year without a summer’ in 1816. This climate event has attracted intense attention in recent years from climate scientists and scholars of environmental humanities, and icy literary visions of environmental disaster produced in these years (Frankenstein, Byron’s Darkness) continue to hold enormous influence in eco-critical studies. Despite contemporary reporting of the Tambora eruption and previous speculation about volcanic effects on climate, it took nearly a hundred years for Tambora and the 1816 climate effects to be linked. Instead, 19th-Century meteorological practitioners proposed causes from sunspots, to arctic ice break-up and global cooling. Luke Howard, prominent British meteorologist and namer-of-clouds, travelled through Europe documenting strange and unseasonable snow and ice forms, collating similar reports from around the globe, and simultaneously attempting to quell public fears and narratives of widespread cooling. This paper examines popular communication and meteorological response in two time periods: first focusing on the immediate British periodical and daily press reporting of the climate events, then jumping to the post-Krakatoa volcanology and climate studies to examine how, and why, the “Year without a summer” cold became re-evaluated in the early and mid 20th-century and accepted as a volcanic effect.

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Paper short abstract:

Corporations and citizens used chrysotile asbestos, a white, fluffy, and carcinogenic material, to represent snow indoors in the first half of the twentieth century. This paper is concerned with how asbestos was used to mimic snow in domestic homes at Christmas and in Hollywood studios.

Paper long abstract:

Humans in snow-heavy regions design their lives and habitats to shelter from the deadly risks snow inherently poses to life, but this doesn’t mean that snow doesn’t retain a romantic appeal. The first half of the twentieth century was a transition period, where people looked for ways to bring snow into their interior spaces because of this appeal, transforming cultural understandings of the frozen material and wider environmental values. New enviro-tech products simulated the look of snow and marketed products that augmented nature to eliminate the risk of cold or melt.

One of the most utilised and ‘realistic’ forms of early simulated snow was chrysotile asbestos, because it was white, fluffy, and its crystalline structure glimmered when light shone upon it. Dusted on Christmas trees, wreaths, and other seasonal decorations, asbestos-snow became a domestic accent, while the seemingly more impractical and dangerous natural snow remained outside. Asbestos snow was also used in Hollywood productions—most notably in the Wizard of Oz (1939) and White Christmas (1954)—to simulate fluffy falling snow on set without risking fire with more flammable material like cotton. This popularised the use of artificial snow and transformed expectations of the human this paper explores the enviro-techno-efforts to create artificial snow with asbestos and the deep cultural—and health—transformation that came with this attempt to simulate and augment the natural world for human consumption.