Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the “Karakoram anomaly” through the lens of Thomas Kuhn’s work on anomalies in science and their implications. It connects the “Karakoram anomaly” to the concept of the Third Pole, thereby analysing the geopolitics of past and present knowledge production.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the “Karakoram anomaly”, a recent debate in cryosphere sciences. On a global scale, glaciers have lost mass, thinned and retreated since the end of the Little Ice Age due to atmospheric warming. However, scholars noted a major regional exception to this trend in Northern Pakistan with expanding rather than shrinking glaciers over the last 20 years. Subsequent research demonstrated that this exception had a much wider geographical reach, and that stable or growing glaciers also were identified in the adjacent Pamir Mountains, the Kunlun Shan and on the Tibetan plateau. The exception is termed an “anomaly”, as stable or growing glaciers present a conundrum to the scientifically established link between glacier melt and rising air temperature. In this paper, I analyse the emergence of the “Karakoram anomaly” in cryosphere sciences and link it to the concept of the Third Pole. “Third Pole” refers geographically to the mountain ranges of South and Central Asia. The concept made its first appearance in scholarly debates at roughly the same time as did the "Karakoram anomaly". The paper argues that scientific debates about the “Karakoram anomaly” reveal how Kuhn's “normal science” of the glacier-climate linkage is currently operating, and how this linkage takes shape within specific past and present imperial formations that create new planetary imaginaries. On the case of the Third Pole, it becomes visible how these imaginaries are the result of interwoven discourses of geosciences and geopolitics.