Mark Carey

the history of ice: how GLACIERS BECAME AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, glaciers have become both a key icon for global warming and a type of endangered species. But to understand why glaciers are so inexorably tied to global warming and why people lament the loss of ice, it is necessary to look beyond climate science and glacier melting—to turn additionally to culture, history, and power relations. Probing historical views of glaciers demonstrates that the recent emergence of an "endangered glacier" narrative stemmed from various glacier perspectives dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: glaciers as menace, scientific laboratories, sublime scenery, recreation sites, places to explore and conquer, and symbols of wilderness. By encompassing so many diverse meanings, glacier and global warming discourse can thus offer a platform to implement historical ideologies about nature, science, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global power dynamics.

"But glaciers, dear friend—ice is only another form of terrestrial love."¹

John Muir

ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1997, Vice President Al Gore delivered a speech from an unusual location, relying on his Secret Service agents to protect him from grizzly bears rather than urban hecklers. Hiking several miles into Montana's Glacier National Park, the vice president stood beneath the melting Grinnell Glacier to speak about climate change and to pledge the Clinton administration's commitment to "reverse the trend of global warming." By 1997, Gore noted, the Grinnell Glacier had retreated approximately 3,100 feet from its location in 1850. It provided a compelling theater, not to mention a beautiful backdrop, for Gore to identify tangible consequences of global warming. He pointed out that the park had lost three-quarters of the 150 glaciers it had in 1850. Worse, the vice president warned solemnly that if trends persist as scientists predict, Glacier National Park will have no glaciers at all by 2030. Lamenting this tragic loss of majestic ice, Gore stressed that the fate of glaciers in Glacier only represented a small part of a broader phenomenon: Global warming was destroying environments and societies on every continent.²

Figure 1. Grinnell Glacier, Glacier National Park, Montana, 1910

Photo by Fred Kiser, courtesy of Glacier National Park Archives.
Note the Grinnell Glacier in the center of the photograph.

Gore's speech marked a key moment when glaciers became inexorably tied to global warming evidence and discourse. By the early twenty-first century, glaciers had reached celebrity status, with almost all popular writers who discussed global warming making glacier retreat a key component of their story.³ Today scarcely a week passes without glaciers or ice sheets making prominent appearances in The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, CNN, or other major North American and European news sources. Even the fashion magazine Vanity Fair discussed glaciers and global warming in its May 2006 "Green Issue." In most of these forums, glaciers appear not simply as ice, but rather as "endangered glaciers," "vanishing ice," and ice sheets that are "slip-sliding away." Headlines signal the end of glacial ice, such as "Glaciers, What Glaciers?" "Glaciers going ... going ..." and "Visitors rush to glimpse vanishing glaciers."⁴ Like rivers that, as Mark Cioc points out, "seem alive to us," glaciers have also come to resemble living things that deserve protection.⁵ In fact, the UN World Heritage Committee recently considered petitions to list glaciers in Peru, Nepal, and Montana as sites "in danger." More than simply an icon for global warming, glaciers have become an endangered species.

But why all the recent fuss about ice? After all, glaciers have been melting for at least a century. What's more, most people in the United States have never encountered a glacier; nor would they be able to identify one even from close proximity. At one of the best, most accessible places in the continental United States to see a glacier—the Nisqually Glacier overlook in Mount Rainier National Park—most visitors I encountered when I was a park ranger could not even decipher the glacier from snowfields and rocks. One visitor who did identify the Nisqually complained that it was "all dirty" compared to Alaska's pristine white glaciers. In Glacier National Park, only a miniscule portion of tourists actually see the glaciers because none are clearly visible from the park's main roads.

Figure 2. Grinnell Glacier, Glacier National Park, Montana, 1998

Photo by Karen Holzer, courtesy of USGS.
This photograph of the Grinnell Glacier, taken in 1998, and the one on the facing page, taken in 1910, show how the glacier has retreated considerably during the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, most people today believe glaciers have become the key icon for global warming for two reasons: their physical melting and the climate records stored in glacial ice. As two editors of the journal Science recently explained, "Ice is important not only because we are losing it but also because it is an archive that has told us much about past climates."⁶ Glacier melting can also generate tragic consequences, such as rising sea levels, the possibility of glacial lake outburst floods, and the loss of water stored as glacial ice. Nevertheless, why would people who clamor to inhabit floodplains, deserts, hurricane paths, and other places susceptible to catastrophic natural disasters be startled into action when confronted with potential sea level rise decades in the future? And why would some of the world's most marginalized groups—Blackfeet Indians, who get water from Glacier National Park, or Nepalese villagers, who might perish in an outburst flood—suddenly appear in the Western consciousness as vital groups to help out? Even if concern for these groups and worry about future natural disasters have sparked campaigns to stop glacier retreat, these motivations still do not explain why glaciers have become an endangered species. Something more is at stake when glaciers melt.

I argue that this recent discourse about glacier retreat—what I call the "endangered glacier" narrative—emerges from glacier perspectives that date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or earlier, long before global warming became an issue and even before glaciers began receding after the Little Ice Age. Moreover, I contend that glaciers became endangered through what Nathan Sayre describes as "social processes," not just science and environmental change.⁷ Glaciers first acquired symbolic and real value and then became victimized as "innocent Nature despoiled" by rampant capitalism, pollution, and overconsumption in the West, particularly the United States. Human interest in glaciers, then, was not simply a response to melting ice. In many cases, the endangered glacier narrative has little to do with the specific consequences of melting glaciers or the scientific data emerging from ice cores. Instead, the glacier discourse weaves together a host of historical narratives that contain multiple meanings for glaciers: glaciers as terrifying menace and natural hazard; glaciers as sublime scenery; glaciers as scientific laboratories; glaciers as sites for mountaineering and tourism; glaciers as remote, empty spaces to conquer; and glaciers as wilderness. All of these narratives figure powerfully into today's endangered glacier narrative. Thus, embedded within recent glacier-climate discourse are entangled historical views of nature, science, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global power dynamics. Saving glaciers offers a platform or a forum to implement these ideologies.

To understand why glaciers have become so inexorably tied to global warming, it is therefore necessary to look beyond science and environmental change—to turn additionally to culture, history, and power dynamics. Surprisingly, environmental historians have remained relatively silent on global warming, even though the roots of and discourse about climate change, greenhouse emissions, climate science, and warming-induced environmental transformations all date to the nineteenth century.⁸ Nor have historians or social scientists given much attention to the cryosphere in general or glaciers in particular. Those who have, with the exception of Stephen Pyne and Julie Cruikshank, do not link eighteenth- and nineteenth- century glacier perceptions with those of the last decades.⁹ Bridging these periods, however, reveals that glacier history does not simply replicate the story of wilderness: the transformation of scary, desolate areas into appealing landscapes. Glacier narratives were more complex, in part because the glaciers themselves played a vital role in shaping these narratives. But ice never acted alone. And people never simply responded to glacier dynamics. Rather, there was a constant intermingling of numerous historical agents—science, technology, culture, social movements, policy, the physical environment, and climate, among others.¹⁰

The goal of this essay is fourfold: (1) to examine historical roots of multiple glacier narratives; (2) to trace narrative changes over time; (3) to analyze the most recent manifestation of glacier narratives within the global warming discourse; and (4) to suggest implications of the endangered glacier narrative for different social groups. I focus on the production of these narratives in western Europe and North America—as expressed through popular science writing, films, television, art, newspapers, popular books, and Internet sites that provide a broad sampling of public perceptions. To dissect these narratives, I build not only on critiques of wilderness, Western science, and mountaineering, but also on parallel analyses of the endangered nature narrative in the context of the Amazon rain forest.¹¹ As Candace Slater explains, when we hear the cry to save the rain forest, "it is well worth asking not just how we can save the rain forest but why we want to do so."¹² The endangered glacier narrative's call to action to protect melting (degraded) glaciers and save civilization generates similar questions: What are people trying to save? Why is it important to save? For whom—and from whom—are they saving glaciers? Who suffers if they are not saved? Answering these questions demonstrates that narratives about melting glaciers are much more than evidence for global warming or threats of natural disaster. At the center of the endangered glacier narrative are questions of power—the power to define nature and, in turn, the power to create specific laws and policies (and not others).¹³ Analyzing these power relations surrounding glaciers, however, does not deny or downplay potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming and glacier retreat. In the Peruvian Andes alone, nearly thirty thousand people have already died from melting glaciers, and the government has spent tens of millions of dollars to avoid potential glacier disasters.¹⁴ Critiquing the endangered glacier narrative, then, does not propose to ignore or disregard global warming. To the contrary, it ultimately strives to refine and redirect climate change responses to make them more effective and just.¹⁵

GLACIERS IN THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION

GLACIER HAVE LONG IGNITED people's imagination. They have vexed travelers, challenged mountaineers, puzzled scientists, inspired poets, and generated fear among nearby residents. At the core of the mystery and awe surrounding glaciers is their changeability, their unpredictable and uncontrollable nature. For topographical features, glaciers are also unique because people have for centuries identified them as living things. By definition, glaciers are moving bodies of ice. They form as snow builds up through consecutive seasons. As snow depth increases, pressure from the weight of the snow itself compresses snow into ice. This ice becomes a glacier when it begins to move, sliding downhill over bedrock and deforming internally. Or, in the case of ice sheets, the ice spreads out like pancake batter. In Greenland and Antarctica, which contain 99 percent of the world's glacial ice, ice sheets spread over thousands of square miles. Glaciers exist on all continents except Australia, and they cover approximately 10 percent of the earth's land surface; in the last ice age, however, they covered as much as 32 percent of the continents. On a daily basis, most glaciers move slowly. The slowest creep less than a few centimeters each day, while the fastest might race across dozens of feet daily. In some cases, glaciers can surge. In early December 1936, for example, Alaska's Black Rapids Glacier frightened guests at a nearby lodge when the glacier's two-mile wide, 350-foot high snout began barreling down on them at 215 feet per day. Because all glaciers are unpredictable and occasionally produce outburst floods or avalanches, they can be uncontrollable, even deadly.¹⁶

MENACING GLACIERS

IN PRE-ENLIGHTENMENT EUROPE, most glacier narratives emphasized menacing characteristics. This was an era when, to most Europeans, high elevation provoked anxiety because, as one went up, the people, the settlements, and the landscape became more backward. Mountains—and alpine glaciers in particular—inspired fear of the cold, snow, and wild inhabitants.¹⁷ As Sebastian Münster reflected in 1546 on the Furka Pass above the Rhone River valley, "I came to an immense mass of ice. As far as I could judge it was about two or three pike lengths thick, and as wide as the range of a strong bow. Its length stretched indefinitely upwards, so that you could not see its end. To anyone looking at it it was a terrifying spectacle, its horror enhanced by one or two blocks the size of a house which had detached themselves from the main mass."¹⁸ Contemporary Europeans had legitimate reasons to fear glaciers. From the fourteenth century to nineteenth, a period now known as the Little Ice Age, advancing glaciers periodically descended into alpine valleys and destroyed communities, crops, and livelihoods.¹⁹ It was these sudden, powerful ice advances that transformed glaciers from remote fears to invading menaces. In 1616, Nicolas de Crans told of La Rosière's advancing Argentière glacier: "The great glacier of La Rosière every now and then goes bounding and thrashing or descending; for the last five or six years ... it has been impossible to get any crops from the places it has covered ... the witness (Michel Faure, of La Rosière) has lost a house and a barn entirely submerged, it being impossible for him and for others who have suffered the same loss to oppose or prevent the fury of the said glacier."²⁰ Unlike today, Little Ice Age inhabitants like Faure and de Crans hoped and prayed that glaciers would melt.

Floods associated with Little Ice Age glaciers caused more damage than advancing ice. As smaller glaciers from tributary valleys advanced into main valleys, they sometimes blocked off valley rivers, creating reservoirs behind glacial ice. In many cases, these new ice dams gave way and burst when rising water exerted too much pressure. For example, Switzerland's Giétroz Glacier dammed the Val de Bagnes in 1549, 1595, and again in 1818. In each case, the ice dam eventually ruptured, resulting in catastrophic outburst floods that killed five hundred people in 1595 and fifty people in 1818.²¹ European pre-Enlightenment glacier perspectives resembled views of deserts, forests, and other aspects of "wilderness": they were remote, desolate, and scary.²² But unlike these other environments, glaciers moved. They could invade human settlements rather than staying put in their isolated niches. Ice itself thus actively influenced human views of and relations with glaciers.

After the mid-nineteenth century, glacier fears shifted to the earth's poles, to advancing ice sheets that would overtake human civilization. Several important pioneering glaciologists, including Louis Agassiz and Sir Charles Lyell, proposed that massive glaciers had covered much of northern Europe in a past Ice Age.²³ These explanations aggravated lingering glacier fears among the public. John Tyndall's claim that the "little glaciers of the present day [were] mere pigmies as compared to the giants of the glacial epoch" fueled apocalyptic visions of colossal ice sheets descending from the earth's poles to join with mountain glaciers and erase civilization. Robert Macfarlane goes so far as to say that the Ice Age for Victorians "was their nuclear winter."²⁴ Ice age fears persisted through much of the twentieth century as well. Thornton Wilder's 1943 play, The Skin of Our Teeth, for example, depicted continental glaciers overtaking New England.²⁵ Soviet engineers during the 1960s wanted to melt polar ice by coating ice sheets with black soot dropped from planes.²⁶ In the 1970s, some hoped that U.S. and Soviet aircraft carriers would haul growing Antarctic icebergs to the Sahara desert, where the ice would melt before its weight caused the earth to roll over.²⁷ Even climate scientists met at Brown University in 1972 to discuss the possible onset of an ice age.²⁸ After severe winter snowstorms in 1977 and 1978, D. S. Halacy, Jr. wrote anxiously, "Like a snowball rolling down a mountain, the snow-blitzed icecap increases rapidly. Before we know it we have an instant frozen horror story that will make the Little Ice Age (which was terrible enough) look like a 'mere climatic fluctuation.'"²⁹ Evidently, such fears have not vanished entirely. In The Day After Tomorrow (2004), filmmakers depict an ice age starting within days, which first drowned and then froze New York City. Narratives of menacing ice clearly did not die out when Little Ice Age glaciers stopped advancing in the mid-nineteenth century. And at various points through history, scientific evidence—though sometimes distorted or simplified—fed fears of advancing glaciers and ice ages.

SUBLIME GLACIERS

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ROMANTICISM transformed desolate, terrifying, and potentially deadly glaciers into alluring landscapes.³⁰ The "sublime" represented this new view of the natural world, in which Nature could be great though horrible, scary though appealing, repulsive though enticing. Hudson River School paintings of Niagara Falls and Frederic Church's paintings of South American volcanoes offer only some of the more famous depictions of sublime nature. Glaciers also exemplified the sublime, and by the early nineteenth century, artists began depicting glaciers in their engravings, paintings, and literature.³¹ Many of these depictions showed glaciers' infinite power and capacity for unpredictable movement. Percy Shelley's 1817 poem "Mont Blanc," for example, reveals continued apprehension about glacier advances while depicting them as living beings:

... The glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their prey,
from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on;
there, many a precipice,
Frost and the Sun
in scorn
of mortal power
Have piled:
dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death,
distinct with many a tower
And wall
impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin.³²

J. M. W. Turner's The Glacier and Source of the Arveiron (1803) and John Brett's The Glacier of Rosenlaui (1856) reveal evolving nineteenth-century glacier paintings, with consistent emphases on both glaciers' sublime characteristics and their power to sculpt the earth and influence human civilization.³³

Figure 3. The Rhone Glacier, Glacier Hotel and Furka Road, Valais, Alps of Switzerland

Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Photochrom Collection, Reproduction Number LC-DIG-ppmsc-07877.
As alpine tourism grew during the nineteenth century, hotels increasingly appeared near glaciers, such as the Rhone, so that tourists could enjoy them from the security of the valley floor or climb directly on the ice. The Rhone Glacier pictured above [1890–1900] has now retreated to the top of the cliff above the hotel.

RECREATIONAL GLACIERS

AS FOREBODING AREAS transformed into alluring environments, Europeans and later North Americans were attracted to glaciers to pursue emotional or spiritual journeys, to conquer forbidden spaces, to prove their masculinity or femininity, to explore new heights, or to challenge their mettle against capricious glaciers. Mountaineering—the sport, that is, since people had been climbing peaks for centuries—began in 1786 with the first successful ascent of Mont Blanc. By the 1850s, a "Mont Blanc mania" existed, especially in England. When the Alpine Club published its first guidebook, Peaks, Passes and Glaciers (1859), the book revealed a definitive interest in traversing glaciers, not just reaching mountain summits. Glaciers' hidden crevasses, insurmountable ice cliffs, threats of avalanches or ice falls, and groaning morasses of jagged ice enticed climbers and challenged them before (and after) reaching alpine pinnacles.³⁴ Not everyone venturing to the Alps after the late eighteenth century sought frightfully pleasing glacier experiences. Many preferred to admire mountains and glaciers from the security of solid ground. By the late nineteenth century, hordes of tourists were mobbing the Alps. Among those flocking to Switzerland was Mark Twain, who tried to "ride" one of the constantly moving glaciers instead of taking a mule down the mountain. He complained, however, that "the passenger part of this glacier—the central part—the lightning-express part, so to speak—was not due in Zermatt till the summer of 2378, and that the baggage, coming along the slow edge, would not arrive until some generations later."³⁵

Figure 4. Glacier of the Rhone [1860–1890]

Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Photochrom Collection, Reproduction Number LC-USZ62–108761.
Early climbers negotiating crevasses on Switzerland's Rhone Glacier.

From the outset, glacier tourism and mountaineering involved more than just recreation. Scholars have critiqued mountaineering and international eco-tourism to show how these activities facilitated exploration and imperialistic, often racist, projects by commodifying mountains and making those landscapes sites for colonial encounters.³⁶ Glaciers, too, lured explorers to the "empty spaces" and the "beauty of untrodden snow."³⁷ When mountaineers plant national flags on summits and transmit landscape images to their home countries, they (sometimes unintentionally) claim those mountains and territories as their own spaces. Further, the national parks created around the world's highest peaks, such as Nepal's Mount Everest or Peru's Mount Huascarán, cater primarily to foreigners. Mid-twentieth century U.S. mountaineers who complained that they had to coax their Sherpa guides across Himalayan glacier crevasses, simultaneously made sweeping statements about race and identity: Sherpas came out as timid, incapable, and thus inferior. In some cases, glaciers became integral to explorers' experiences and thus sites where groups contested and negotiated their social, racial, gender, ethnic, and national identities.³⁸

Figure 5. Boulder Glacier, Glacier National Park, 1932

Photo by George Grant, courtesy of Glacier National Park Archives.
Tourists admire the Boulder Glacier ice cave.

SCIENTIFIC GLACIERS

AS ARTISTS, MOUNTAINEERS, and tourists increasingly sought out glaciers after the eighteenth century, so too did scientists.³⁹ The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment had challenged Biblical explanations for science, turning increasingly to reason and mathematical perspectives. By the nineteenth century, these new ways of studying nature had produced the fields of geology and glaciology. Glaciologists initially targeted three research areas, which remain major foci today: (1) glacier mechanics, such as ice flow and internal movement; (2) geomorphology and effects of glaciers on the landscape; and (3) past glaciations, including ice ages and geology.⁴⁰ Louis Agassiz, the Swiss scientist generally credited with founding glaciology, spent considerable time on the Unteraar Glacier to elaborate his glacier movement theories during the 1830s and 1840s. He set up a small cabin on the glacier moraine and took measurements annually—even continuing his studies after glacier motion crushed his "field station" in the 1840s. So important was research at glaciers—rather than relying on second-hand observations—that, as Bruce Hevly contends, the validity of the science hinged on heroism, manly exertion, risk, physical discomfort, and direct action experienced on glaciers.⁴¹ Glacier science sometimes had political and nationalistic implications as well. During the Cold War, for example, glaciers and ice sheets became key strategic sites as national interests drove an astonishing amount of scientific research in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic. From the outset, then, glacier researchers went to the glacial ice to study science and prove their theories. In the process, they transformed glaciers into scientific laboratories—into sources of data and objects of scrutiny for a particular type of knowledge: Western science.

Figure 6. Former Site of Boulder Glacier, Glacier National Park, 1988

Photo by Jerry DeSanto, courtesy of USGS.
This photo of Boulder Glacier taken in 1988, and the one on the facing page taken in 1932, shot from the same location, demonstrate clearly how the glacier has retreated, completing disappearing where the ice cave existed previously.

WILDERNESS GLACIERS

IN THEIR MAJESTIC GLORY, their clear expression of the sublime, and their habitat in mountains and remote places, glaciers have long exemplified wilderness. The concept of wilderness has a complex history that environmental historians have widely analyzed, critiqued, and more recently condemned for being elitist, racist, and ahistorical.⁴² John Muir was one of the earliest and most famous advocates for preserving wilderness, including glaciers. The Ice Chief, as Tlingit people called Muir, eschewed the terrifying side of the sublime and rejected the Victorian fear of destructive glaciers. He saw glaciers as God's magic, as a form of terrestrial love. He grouped them with the birds, butterflies, and daisies—as beautiful nature meant to be enjoyed.⁴³ Muir's "glacier gospel" left an enduring legacy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. government created important national parks and monuments that protected glaciated landscapes: Mount Rainier (1899), Glacier (1910), Mount McKinley (1917), and Glacier Bay (1925). Glacier Bay, for example, became a national monument in large part because of the tidewater glaciers' stunning scenery. In sharp contrast to the twenty-first century endangered glacier narrative, however, scientists in the 1920s argued that Glacier Bay glaciers were important and valuable to humanity because they were retreating, not advancing or remaining stagnant as people today wish. National park advocate and ecologist William Cooper believed Glacier Bay's receding glaciers offered an ideal site to study primary succession, and creation of the national monument would protect the area as a scientific laboratory, free of human influence.⁴⁴ Throughout the twentieth century, glaciated mountains in particular fit into national park and wilderness ideals because, as Susan Schrepfer explains, "they seemed so 'real'—savage, adamant, and specific."⁴⁵ In short, like wilderness generally, glaciers came to symbolize those wild places saved from the nefarious consequences of the industrialized, overconsuming modern world. When Al Gore used Glacier National Park to inspire action against global warming, he relied upon and appealed to these wilderness sentiments more than to specific regional concerns about the park's melting ice.

Figure 7. The Deutscher Alpenverein, Climbing and Scientific Expedition to Peru, 1932

Photo courtesy of Hans Kinzl Archive, Institute of Geography, University of Innsbruck, Austria.
The Deutscher Alpenverein (German Alpine Society) led expeditions to Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountains in 1932, 1936, and 1939. Sending research and climbing teams abroad since 1913, the society sought to integrate mountaineering with scientific study. The Peruvian expeditions emphasized climbing as well as glacier studies and cartography, producing the first detailed maps of the Cordillera Blanca. See Hans Kinzl and Erwin Schneider, Cordillera Blanca (Peru), (Innsbruck: Universitatsverlag Wagner, 1950).

GLACIERS AND GLOBAL WARMING

THOUGH MOST PEOPLE HAVE been aware of global warming only since the 1980s, scientists have recognized that humans could warm the earth by emitting greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane for more than a century. In 1896, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first postulated that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause global temperatures to increase five or six degrees Celsius. At that point, however, nobody worried about emissions, in part because Arrhenius thought it would take a thousand years to double carbon dioxide levels. In 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar made a stronger case to London's Royal Meteorological Society, insisting that carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels was warming the world's climate. But it took the Cold War, interestingly, to inspire the most conclusive research on global warming. From the 1940s to the 1980s, the Soviet, European, and U.S. governments—in particular the U.S. Office of Naval Research—funded vast amounts of research on weather, oceans, and polar regions, including measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, scientists created sophisticated new computer-generated climatic analyses. With this detailed data, scientists such as Jule Charney and James Hansen convinced the United States and other nations to pursue more comprehensive understandings of global climate change.

Then, a series of events during the 1980s pushed global warming from scientific conferences and journals to popular newspapers, magazines, and television. First, widely publicized scientific evidence from the Vostok ice core extracted from Antarctica demonstrated a clear link between carbon dioxide levels and temperatures, confirming that for the past 160,000 years the two rose and fell together. Second, pollution concerns, especially the 1985 discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica and ongoing battles with acid rain, made people realize that humans could alter the atmosphere and thus, perhaps, change global climate. Third, these same pollution concerns galvanized the growing environmental community to fight global warming. And fourth, a killer 1988 heat wave revealed that warmer temperatures were real—and unpleasant at best, deadly at worst. These combined factors helped make 79 percent of the U.S. population aware of the greenhouse effect in 1989, a dramatic increase from 38 percent in 1981. Awareness had also grown internationally. In response, the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, a multinational body of scientific and government experts that remains the world's most widely cited source of climate analyses.⁴⁶

Glaciers contributed significantly both to the science of climate change and to public awareness of it. In fact, recognition that ice sheet melting could significantly raise sea levels—and inundate many of the world's major cities—has driven global warming concerns at least since the 1970s. And by the early 1980s, many began to worry specifically about the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its contribution to significant sea level rise as early as 2100. Vanishing ice thus presented a real climatic threat rather than just fictional depictions of ice sheet disasters.⁴⁷ Additionally, glaciers and ice sheets provide fundamental clues about global warming because they store climatic records in annual ice layers. Snow crystals, dust layers, and gas bubbles trapped in glacial ice contain components of the atmosphere. By extracting ice cores (cylinders of ice removed vertically from the glacier surface to its bedrock), scientists can access the atmospheric data stored within glaciers, including temperature, precipitation, atmospheric chemistry and gas composition, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, and other climate indicators.⁴⁸ Moreover, annual ice layers in glaciers build up over time—in a similar way to annual tree rings—thereby allowing scientists to determine precise dates for when glacial ice formed. As Elizabeth Kolbert discovered at a coring site on the Greenland ice sheet, "a hundred and thirty-eight feet down, there is snow that fell during the time of the American Civil War; 2,500 feet down, snow from the time of the Peloponnesian Wars, and, 5,350 feet down, snow from the days when the cave painters of Lascaux were slaughtering bison."⁴⁹

Ice cores offer some of the most detailed and extensive data for reconstructing climate history. Scientists had bored into ice long before popular awareness of global warming in the 1980s. In fact, Louis Agassiz drilled into glacial ice in the 1840s. But Agassiz, and others for a century after him, wanted to peer inside the glacier or to reach its base rather than analyze extracted ice. In the 1950s, scientific interest in ice coring surged. In 1951, researchers used the first machine drill to bore into a glacier, and in 1954, Willi Dansgaard, of the University of Copenhagen, showed that the ratio of oxygen isotopes in ice indicated cloud temperatures at the time the snow fell. In short, Dansgaard revealed how glaciers recorded past temperatures. By the 1960s, major ice core drilling projects had begun in Greenland and Antarctica, again with impetus from the Cold War. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers collected Greenland's first ice core at Camp Century in 1966, and researchers followed with another core from Byrd Station, Antarctica, in 1968. Meanwhile, the Soviet Vostok ice core removed from Antarctica in the early 1980s yielded 160,000 years of climate history. By the 1990s, European and U.S. teams had bored through ice roughly two miles deep in Greenland, penetrating more than 100,000 years into the past. The grand prize of cores is now Antarctica's Dome C ice core, extracted by a consortium of ten European countries in 2004. Dome C provides a stunning 740,000 years of climate history.⁵⁰ Not surprisingly, ice core projects demand rigorous work in extremely remote locations where temperatures plunge so far below zero that researchers can lose a finger within minutes or watch their breath fall to the ground as ice. As famous ice corer Richard Alley describes the experience: "Drilling ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica usually involves getting on a ski-equipped plane and flying a few hundred miles over snow to a place where people live in tents at a temperature of thirty degrees below zero. Using an assortment of snowmobiles, skis, caterpillar tractors, computers, and a lot of 'elbow grease' and 'bigger hammers,' drillers race the short summer to pull sticks of ice up from the depths beneath their feet, analyze that ice, and ship it home." No wonder Alley notes enviously that a key difference between the 1990s European and U.S. Greenland ice core projects was the availability of wine at the European project.⁵¹

Though Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets provide the longest ice cores, mountain glaciers have also yielded historical climate data. Since the 1970s, Ohio State University's Lonnie Thompson has pioneered and led alpine ice coring worldwide. For a man with asthma, Thompson has spent an extraordinary amount of time between 15,000 and 22,000 feet above sea level, where he collects ice cores. After his early 1970s experience analyzing dust layers from Antarctic ice cores, Thompson turned his attention to Peru's Quelccaya ice cap, securing the first Andean ice core in 1983. Initially, colleagues and funding agencies frowned on Thompson's Peru mission. They doubted that mountain ice cores would yield helpful climate records and believed Quelccaya's extreme elevation above 18,000 feet and remote location (more difficult to access than Antarctica some have said) posed too many obstacles to make it worthwhile. But the Quelccaya ice core provided a clear climate record back to 470 A.D.. It revealed useful information, not only to show archaeologists how drought correlated with ancient Andean social organization, but also to demonstrate that the Little Ice Age had affected tropical regions, not just the Northern Hemisphere as previously thought.⁵² After Quelccaya, Thompson continued—and continues still today—to collect mountain ice cores, overcoming countless logistical challenges and frightening situations around the world. After extracting a core from the Guliya ice cap in western China in 1991, for example, his team hauled the ice across the Gobi Desert, using ice cream to keep the cores cold when one of the trucks broke down. On Peru's Mt. Huascarán in 1993, he camped above 20,000 feet for 53 days straight. As if that prolonged exposure to high elevation was not enough, one terrifying night he had to drive his ice axe through the floor of his tent to stop a tumultuous fall that began when a gale blew his tent toward a massive cliff. Colleagues in the climate sciences praise his "daring rescues of the ice and its records." James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, claims that "If he wasn't doing it [collecting mountain ice cores], we'd lose those records forever. He's a sort of hero."⁵³ He also ranks among the country's top scientists, according to CNN and Time. As his fame spreads beyond academia, he increases international awareness of glaciers, their role in climate science, and their impending extinction.

Glaciers' physical changes—their continued and accelerating melting—account for another reason that ice masses have advanced into the limelight as proof of a warming world. Though ice flow, angle, glacier type, solar radiation, latitude, elevation, and internal dynamics all affect glacier mass, climate is the most important factor determining glacier behavior and size. Warm years with little precipitation cause glaciers to retreat; cold and wet years make glaciers advance. Mountain glaciers thus offer ideal indicators of global climate change because, as climate scientist Wallace Broecker explains, "the record created by these glaciers is an excellent proxy for climate, standing in for hundreds of years of thermometer readings."⁵⁴ As early as 1894, the Commission Internationale des Glaciers studied glacier lengths to learn about climate change. By the mid-twentieth century, glacier-climate studies became more common, especially with the growing collection of ice cores. In 1971, historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published his famous study of climate history based heavily on analysis of European glacier advances and retreats over the past millennium.⁵⁵ By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, scientific organizations such as the World Glacier Monitoring Service and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center were collecting extensive data and research on glacier-climate interactions worldwide.⁵⁶

Though glaciers have advanced during some periods since 1850 and not all glaciers have been retreating since the Little Ice Age ended, most of the world's glaciers show clear signs of retreat since the late nineteenth century. And this retreat has accelerated since the late 1970s.⁵⁷ In some places glaciers have disappeared entirely, such as Ecuador's Mount Cotacachi. Glacier retreat, as Al Gore and others have shown, thus offers clearly visible, tangible evidence of climate change. Undoubtedly, the science and technology that facilitated glacier-climate research helped propel glaciers into global warming discourse. But the retreat of the glaciers themselves—and photographs of these disappearing glaciers—have provided the public with more vivid, less contestable, and more compelling evidence of global warming and its effects than any graphs of historical carbon dioxide levels or temperature have been able to achieve. In sum, fear of sea level rise from melting ice sheets, extensive climate data from ice cores, the race to save mountain ice cores before glaciers vanish, and clearly visible evidence of glacier retreat worldwide have all propelled glaciers into the center of global warming discussions. These physical changes and scientific data have also fueled new narratives about endangered glaciers—melting ice masses in danger of disappearance.

SAVING ENDANGERED GLACIERS

FEW MELTING GLACIERS have captured as much international attention as those atop Mount Kilimanjaro. Since 1912, the year of the first reliable measurements of Kilimanjaro glacier coverage, Tanzania's 19,340 foot peak has lost 80 percent of its glacial ice. Thirty percent of this loss has occurred since the early 1980s.⁵⁸ Kilimanjaro burst into the international press when, in February 2001, Lonnie Thompson announced that the mountain would lose all its glaciers by 2015 or 2020. He made his estimation after drilling six ice cores from Kilimanjaro, the first cores from African glaciers. Thompson's primary goal was to extract historical climate data from ice cores (he ended up with an 11,700 year record). But he and his co-authors also worried that "The loss of Kilimanjaro's permanent ice fields will have both climatological and hydrological implications for local populations, who depend on the water generated from the ice fields during the dry seasons and monsoon failures."⁵⁹ Though Georg Kaser and other scientists have since indicated that water from Kilimanjaro's glaciers "has been of little importance to the lowlands in modern times" given the very small amount of ice, the press nonetheless pounced on Thompson's dire prediction: Hemingway's famous "Snows of Kilimanjaro" would soon vanish, impinging on drinking water supplies, irrigation, hydroelectricity, and tourism.⁶⁰ By November 2001, Greenpeace activists had climbed to the top of Kilimanjaro to broadcast a message via satellite about the dangerous link between melting glaciers and global warming. In January 2003, Kilimanjaro again made headlines when a group of trekkers watched and photographed the mountain's Furtwängler Glacier as a massive ten-story-high chunk of ice broke off dramatically from the glacier. National Geographic Adventure, which distributed Vince Keipper's photographs of the event, went on to call the collapsing glacier "dramatic proof of a scientific near-certainty: Kilimanjaro's glaciers are disappearing."⁶¹ By 2003, attention on Kilimanjaro had led Zimbabwean scientist Euan Nisbet of Royal Holloway University in London to propose a plan to "salvage the glaciers before they disappear altogether." By hanging white, synthetic tarps over the thirty-meter-high ice cliffs of the glaciers' edges, Nisbet hoped these drapes could seal the ice, reduce evaporation, and reflect sunlight—thereby saving the glaciers. Other scientists were skeptical. Thompson believes it is too late to save Kilimanjaro ice because the world's climate is already in motion, while Douglas Hardy suggests the tarps could speed up melting by acting as blankets. Though Nisbet's plans evaporated, popular discourse maintains its focus on preserving the snows of Kilimanjaro, an African icon.⁶²

Kilimanjaro demonstrates a broader process by which glaciers shifted from mere ice to a symbol of global warming to an endangered species in need of protection. Kilimanjaro became endangered through many steps: (1) the chronicling of glacier disappearance; (2) the rescuing of (Western) scientific data from vanishing ice; (3) the identification of a menace or problem, in this case water loss; (4) the lamenting about destruction of innocent, though symbolic, ice; and (5) taking measures to save glaciers from extinction. Kilimanjaro thus reveals not only the many steps in rendering glaciers endangered, but also the complexity and breadth of the endangered glacier narrative, which goes well beyond climate records and physical glacier changes. Discourse about melting African ice contains embedded historical Western narratives about scenery, science, wilderness, natural resources, exploration, recreation, and even imperialism. Ironically, as Kilimanjaro glaciers have become a global indicator for global warming, scientists have more recently shown that their melting has less to do with rising temperatures than atmospheric drying, which has for more than a century contributed to reduced cloud cover and increased solar radiation.⁶³ Proponents of the endangered glacier discourse, however, tend to overlook or simplify these complexities of glacier retreat.

During the past decade, the majority of glacier stories produced for the general public have strived to document that the world's glaciers are in fact melting. Gore's 1997 chronicling of glacier retreat in Glacier National Park exemplifies this trend: He offered statistics and markers to demonstrate 150 years of glacier recession with barely any reference to consequences of ice loss in northwestern Montana. This practice continues. In early 2005, CNN posted an Associated Press article that spoke of glacier retreat worldwide: "They'll disappear far beyond Bolivia. From Alaska in the north, to Montana's Glacier National Park, to the great ice fields of wild Patagonia ... the storied snows of Mount Kilimanjaro are vanishing. In the icebound Alps and Himalayas of Europe and Asia, the change has been stunning."⁶⁴ On July 10, 2006, Science Daily reported that approximately 50 percent of the Alps glacier coverage has vanished since 1850, and 80 percent could disappear by 2100. For Mark Lynas, glacier retreat produced anger and frustration. Lynas had traveled to Peru to find a particular glacier on Mt. Rurichinchey in the country's most glaciated mountain range, the Cordillera Blanca. Lynas' father had photographed the glacier in 1982. To discover how the ice mass weathered global warming, Lynas backpacked several days in search of the glacier. "I knew that the changes I would witness on this glacier," Lynas explains, "symbolised the wider climate changes taking place right across the planet." But upon reaching the point where his father had photographed the glacier two decades before, Lynas could only curse in astonishment: "It's gone! The whole ... glacier's gone."⁶⁵

Although glaciers are just topographical features, these articles tend to victimize glaciers, to portray them as living—though nearly dead—beings, and to anthropomorphize ice by assigning feelings and emotions. As one visitor to Alaska's South Sawyer Glacier recently exclaimed, "It's alive, it's absolutely alive.... I never expected a glacier to have so much character."⁶⁶ Of course, twenty-first century journalists and science writers are not the first to portray glaciers as living beings. Observers have for centuries referred to them as alive. But the discourse has changed. Whereas Percy Shelley compared glaciers to snakes and John Muir referred to them as "traveling animals that make their own tracks," writers now cast the ice as "a sick friend in ailing health."⁶⁷ Elizabeth Kolbert described an Icelandic glacier as "forlorn," like a dying acquaintance. "If I returned in another decade," she wrote, "the glacier would probably no longer even be visible from the ridge where I was standing. I climbed back up to take a second look."⁶⁸ Austrian scientist Gernot Patzelt, who was involved with the extraction of the 5,200 year old remains of the Iceman named Ötzi, who melted out of a glacier in 1991, confessed that he "sympathized with the languishing glaciers, preferring to see them grow robustly down a slope."⁶⁹ And Mark Lynas believed that in his father's 1982 photograph, the Andean glacier looked "awe-inspiring and invincible." Now he saw the glacier as "surprisingly frail," vanishing within a single generation.⁷⁰ Even the terminology to describe glacier melting—retreat, loss, vanish, death, ruin, disappear, waste, extinct, endangered—evokes important messages about these ice masses, spurring people to lament them rather than simply chronicling their change over time. Though these writers are discussing ice, their language and emotions sound similar to descriptions of disappearing Bengali tigers, panda bears, and mountain gorillas. The menacing glaciers of the eighteenth century have become vulnerable, charming aspects of nature worth protecting—a transformation not unlike that of wolves in U.S. history, which changed from ferocious enemies to endearing animals worth federal protection and reintroduction in Yellowstone.⁷¹

When writers do mention potential problems with glacier retreat, they usually refer to hazards or water loss. The natural-hazards discourse perpetuates longstanding narratives of menacing glaciers. But unlike past concerns of advancing glaciers or ice sheets, the global warming narrative shifts the glacier menace to glacial lake outburst floods and sea level rise stemming from retreating glaciers. This shift has occurred only in the past few decades, even though glaciers have been retreating for nearly 150 years. Glacial lakes form when glaciers recede, leaving precariously-dammed lakes in the space where ice previously existed. Outburst floods occur when these lakes break through their weak moraine dams. Glacial lake outburst floods following glacier retreat already have killed thousands in the Peruvian Andes, where engineers have drained and dammed three dozen glacial lakes since the 1950s and continue to monitor nearly four hundred glacial lakes in the Cordillera Blanca alone.⁷² In the Himalaya, these floods also pose serious risks to inhabitants and infrastructure. Since 1935, twelve Himalayan outburst floods have devastated valleys, and in 2001 the UN Environment Program identified twenty-six dangerous glacial lakes in Nepal and twenty-two in Bhutan that are likely to cause outburst floods.⁷³ A London newspaper reported anxiously on these precarious lakes and potential floods, explaining that "the prospect of these glacial lakes bursting their banks and obliterating whole villages is frightening."⁷⁴ Retreating glaciers threaten not only mountain regions. Recent observations about the Greenland ice sheet's accelerating rate of melting—much faster than scientists expected—have aggravated sea level concerns.⁷⁵ As Greenpeace International put it, "A full breakdown [of the Greenland ice sheet] would result in a catastrophic global sea level rise of 7 meters [23 feet]. That's bye-bye most of Bangladesh, Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis."⁷⁶ Greenland has only 10 percent of Antarctica's ice, making the latter's potential melting even more catastrophic. Invoking the sublime, wilderness, and menacing ice perspectives, BBC correspondent Richard Black explains the Antarctica conundrum: "Huge, pristine, dramatic, unforgiving; the Antarctic is where the biggest of all global changes could begin. There is so much ice here that if it all melted, sea levels globally would rise hugely—perhaps as much as 80m [262 feet]. Say goodbye to London, New York, Sydney, Bangkok, Rio ... in fact, the majority of the world's major cities."⁷⁷

Melting ice also threatens societies because glaciers act as water towers. They not only store water as ice; they also release it when people most need it, in the warm, dry seasons. Without glaciers, the BBC explains, "the stored water would descend in a rush in spring, as soon as the snow began to melt."⁷⁸ As a result of this capacity to store water and regulate stream flow, many worry that disappearing glaciers are "threatening the livelihoods of millions of people and the future of countless species."⁷⁹ The World Heritage Committee goes further, suggesting that water lost with melting glaciers is "eventually leading to famine and pandemic disease."⁸⁰ While millions rely on Himalayan glacier water, Andean glaciers supply water for extremely dry regions. Mark Lynas sees a severe predicament for Peru's capital city of Lima, a desert city with 8 million residents. Glaciers and snow from the Central Andes provide water for Lima. But these mountains lost a third of their glaciers between 1970 and 1997. As the city's population swells and glaciers shrink in the future, Lynas believes that life in Lima "will quickly become impossible." Lima's projected 10 million inhabitants in 2015, he concludes, "will be forced to move or die."⁸¹ He speculates that this same scenario will play out in Quito, Ecuador, and La Paz, Bolivia, as well as for hundreds of millions of people surrounding the Himalaya and Tien Shan mountains. Worries about decreasing water supplies from glaciers have generated a new glacier narrative: glaciers as natural resources.

Concerns about melting glaciers—combined with increasing compassion for the frail, forlorn ice—have stimulated efforts to protect glaciers and list them as endangered. In 2004, UNESCO inducted Denmark's Ilulissat Icefjord in Greenland into the select group of 830 World Heritage sites worldwide, of which the vast majority (644) are cultural properties rather than natural. The designation sought to protect the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier, a "dramatic and awe-inspiring natural phenomenon," according to UNESCO. The World Heritage designation signifies that this glacier now represents "outstanding value to humanity," that ice is one of the world's "irreplaceable sources of life and inspiration," and that a glacier can "belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located."⁸²

But protected status, many argue, is not enough to save vanishing glaciers. In addition, the glaciers such as those in "Glacier National Park in Montana and adjacent Waterton National Park in Canada should be declared endangered, because climate change is eliminating glaciers and harming the park environment."⁸³ In 2006, a dozen organizations submitted a petition to UNESCO to add Glacier-Waterton International Peace Park, Peru's Huascarán National Park, and Nepal's Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park to the list of thirty-one World Heritage sites "in danger." Glacier retreat figured most prominently in the justification for declaring these parks endangered. Though UNESCO did not ultimately approve the petition, its serious consideration demonstrated how the "glaciers as endangered wilderness" narrative yields attempts to set aside melting glaciers in protected areas. Beyond UNESCO, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), a multinational organization founded in 1948, also has been involved in protecting glaciers by strengthening nature preserves in mountain regions worldwide, and especially at Glacier National Park and Mount Kilimanjaro.⁸⁴ The longstanding impulse to save nature by fencing it off in protected areas thus applies to glaciers, too.

Glacier narratives of loss that spurred enhanced protection and endangered status for glaciated areas have also inspired efforts to save specific glaciers. Just as Nisbet proposed to cover Kilimanjaro with tarps, European ski resorts use PVC foam and other covers to shield key portions of glaciers—the parts critical for resort operation—from melting. Because many predict that global warming and glacier retreat will eliminate ski terrain within decades from all but the highest of European peaks, ski resorts in the Alps have attempted to maintain the lucrative ski industry by preserving glacial ice. Recreational glaciers have clearly become natural resources as well. In Andermatt, Switzerland, the Gemsstock Ski Resort recently spent $84,000 on PVC foam to cover approximately 43,000 square feet of the Gurschen Glacier. Resort spokesman Carlo Danioth reported that the Gurschen Glacier has been melting more than fifteen feet per year, generating enough alarm to invest in the protective glacier cloak.⁸⁵ The Swiss effort is part of a larger campaign among Central Alps ski resorts to stem glacier retreat. Workers at the Stubai Glacier Ski Resort near Innsbruck, Austria, also tried to save ice by covering approximately twenty-five acres of its Stubai Glacier with white fleece. The Stubai resort, like ski resorts elsewhere, drives a major recreation industry that employs roughly three hundred people and brings in 1.2 million tourists annually who spend $34 million a year. To help maintain such profitable businesses, researchers near Innsbruck have tested several materials and developed technologies that could help other resorts. Andrea Fischer, head researcher of the project, explains that they have tested twenty-five types of glacier covers, including hemp, wool, and polypropylene.⁸⁶

Cleary, longstanding views of and interactions with "recreational glaciers" motivated these glacier-saving strategies. Recreation has made mountain ice a natural resource as well. But these glacier-saving campaigns do not appeal to some groups interested in targeting root causes of global warming. The World Wildlife Fund, for example, scorned the ski resort projects. "We need to get to the cause of what's happening to the glacier and that cause is global warming," argues Martin Hiller, WWF spokesperson for climate change. "To stop this we have to cut the emissions that cause global warming, we need to cut down on harmful pollutants, such as carbon dioxide. We must increase the pressure on governments and business to force the power sector, which is the biggest producer of these emissions, to make a shift towards renewable energies before our glaciers disappear."⁸⁷ Alexander Hauri of Greenpeace is more adamant, calling the Swiss Gemsstock Ski Resort tactic "absolutely absurd" because it would not stop global warming.⁸⁸ Though both the environmental groups and the ski resorts are fighting against global warming, they obviously have different objectives—and agendas—for their responses: Environmentalists remain dedicated to fighting capitalist overconsumption and industrialization rather than mitigating local effects of glacier retreat and global warming.

There are other reasons to save glaciers. Because ice cores have yielded such important historical climate data, researchers are rushing to extract cores before glaciers melt. Glaciers thus serve as laboratories for scientific research while ice has become raw data to extract and analyze. Moreover, publicity from ice coring increases the urgency to save "these vanishing archives, and there is not much time."⁸⁹ Keith Alverson, director of the Swiss nonprofit group Past Climate Changes, compares the loss of climate data from vanishing glaciers to "a great library on fire." Consequently, he commends Lonnie Thompson for "racing through expeditions to Asia, South America, and Alaska to retrieve endangered samples."⁹⁰ In a strange turn of history, then, in a few decades remnants of Mount Kilimanjaro glaciers or Peru's Quelccaya ice cap might only exist as specimens in freezers in Ohio or Colorado.

In some cases, saving glaciers with tarps or as ice cores is not enough. Canada's Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort in British Columbia recently began to grow their glaciers. By first installing fences to prevent snow from blowing off the glaciers and then by making artificial snow to maintain the glaciers' mass balance, the resort hopes to preserve its glacierized ski terrain. As the resort manager commented, "With a significant amount of snowmaking (a half-million cubic meters annually) we can actually grow the glacier."⁹¹ In Ladakh, India, with less than seven centimeters of annual rainfall, retired civil engineer Chewang Norphel has been building artificial glaciers to help villagers sow their crops. Known locally as the "Glacier Man," Norphel began pooling annual snowmelt and rainwater behind stone embankments to make artificial glaciers in the late 1990s. Natural glacier meltwater does flow through Ladakh, but it comes late in the season—too late for growing wheat, barley, and peas. Norphel was thus unsatisfied with the natural glacier, explaining that he "saw a lot of water just running off and getting wasted in winter. And it is then that it occurred to me, why not try and make artificial glaciers in the vicinity of the villages so that local farmers get a real head start in the supply of water when they most need it." By 2001, Norphel had helped residents construct five of these artificial glaciers. The largest, which in 2006 was more than two-kilometers long, supplies enough irrigation water for seven hundred people in the village and cost only $2,000 to construct.⁹² The creation of fabricated glaciers—and the simultaneous eschewing of "wild" glaciers in order to meet local natural resource needs—suggests that human-glacier relations are influenced by more than just climate and greenhouse gasses. As glaciers become more valuable as natural resources, politics, economics, and power relations play increasingly decisive roles in how societies perceive and manage glaciated regions.

CRITIQUES AND CONCLUSIONS

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS of the endangered glacier narrative raises several issues about the relationship of discourse, power, and environment. Implicitly or explicitly, environmental narratives promote specific agendas because they construct nature and environmental problems in certain ways.⁹³ Thus, while it is vital to respond quickly to global warming and glacier melting, today's glacier narrative can be problematic because it contains underlying messages about what to save, how to save it, and for whom to save it. In short, popular glacier discourse can sometimes serve to: (1) legitimize and inspire Western intervention in glaciated areas; (2) portray local residents as passive victims suffering helplessly; and (3) promote an ahistorical, paradoxical outcome by seeking to make glaciers static.

The race to save Mount Kilimanjaro's glacier scenery and Mount Everest's recreational glaciers, as well as the urgent quest to collect ice cores for analysis in Europe and the United States, construes the world's glaciers as Western playgrounds and laboratories. By depicting glaciated areas as vacant lands in need of protection and salvation of the ice, the endangered glacier narrative inspires and justifies an influx of Westerners to extract ice or to control lands through World Heritage initiatives. Given the often contentious historical relations between national parks and indigenous peoples, including Sagarmatha and Huascarán National Parks, two of the sites considered for World Heritage endangered status, the conservation strategies handed down from international bodies could turn out to be antagonistic or alienating to locals.⁹⁴ Also, when Mark Bowen complains that Lonnie Thompson's research team had to leave one of three ice cores—a "sacrificial core," as the team called it—extracted from China within the country rather than taking it to Ohio, Bowen implies that the world's glacial ice belongs to U.S. scientists, not the residents or scientists in places where glaciers exist.⁹⁵ When Thompson claims that he generally collects ice cores from "a place that no one has ever been," he suggests that these glaciated regions are empty and available laboratories for Western scientists. Thompson himself maintains good relations with local communities; yet social scientists have for decades pointed to conflicts that can emerge when Western science and objectives trump local considerations.⁹⁶ These historical issues bring up questions to consider now: Will local residents be denied access to ice in the future to save glaciers? Will native people in Peru and Alaska one day demand the repatriation of their ice now stored in Ohio and Colorado, as they have with artifacts and specimens extracted from indigenous lands in the past?⁹⁷

By rendering glaciers and glaciated areas as the domain of Westerners, the endangered glacier narrative simultaneously ignores local residents and the diversity of their glacier views. For example, local groups have sometimes disagreed with scientific monitoring of glaciers and disaster mitigation measures. Several years ago in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountains (Huascarán National Park), the local community of Hualcán removed and destroyed scientific instruments placed on nearby glaciers because some residents feared that the instruments caused drought. Scientists told me that when they returned to Hualcán to collect their stolen equipment, community members refused to comply and the discussion deteriorated into a rock-throwing confrontation. Intra-community struggles over water rights complicated the issue as well. Clearly, locals had different notions than scientists about how best to respond to climate change and glacier retreat. And their responses could not be divorced from historical power struggles within Hualcán itself and between indigenous communities and the Peruvian state. In Nepal, below the dangerous Imja glacial lake that previously caused a major outburst flood and threatens to produce another, local Sherpa residents have disagreed about how best to avoid potential calamity. Some believed tampering with the natural world through disaster mitigation efforts could actually make them more vulnerable. A previous flood's destruction primarily of foreign-built infrastructure proved to many that technological manipulations of the environment could be worse than letting the glacial lakes run their course.⁹⁸ The endangered glacier narrative's call to action to prevent outburst floods generally does not consider the complexity of societal meanings ascribed to glaciers, mountains, and waterways. The discourse also implicitly suggests that alternative views—and the people who hold them—are backward and irrational.

Further, like past plans to save nature in national parks, attempts to save endangered mountain glaciers in protected areas can often sound like attempts to freeze glaciers in time, to stop glaciers' movement and deny their historical changeability.⁹⁹ Not only portraying ice as static, the glacier discourse also tends to (mis)portray local residents as passive victims waiting helplessly beneath retreating glaciers. When Mark Lynas, in his discussion of potential water shortages stemming from Andean glacier retreat, concludes that 10 million Lima residents will have to "move or die" because of melting glaciers, he portrays Peruvians as unable to respond and incapable of adapting to global warming. Yet this interpretation defies history. With nearly thirty thousand deaths caused by Peruvian glacier disasters since 1941, the country has suffered cataclysmic consequences of glacier melting. At the same time, Peruvians never waited helplessly for the next disaster. They pioneered engineering methods to drain and dam more than three dozen dangerous glacial lakes; they began the earliest glacier monitoring program for tropical glaciers and developed a new science for studying glacial lakes; they dramatically increased hydroelectricity generation and irrigation projects beneath retreating glaciers; and they have achieved most of these accomplishments with little foreign technical or financial aid.¹⁰⁰ Clearly, glacier retreat has produced far-reaching consequences, and societies have had to contend with and adapt to these impacts—impacts that go well beyond the loss of playgrounds, laboratories, and wilderness. If Western glacier-saving campaigns emphasized these issues of adaptation—as well as focusing on protecting glaciers through emissions reduction and climate control—then the endangered glacier narrative would ground global warming discussion in local realities and offer a more comprehensive approach to the problem of glacier melting.

But the endangered glacier narrative is about much more than global warming. It is the confluence of various historical glacier views—glaciers as menace, scientific laboratory, sublime scenery, recreation sites, places to explore and conquer, and symbols of raw wilderness—that now culminate in the endangered glacier narrative that both mourns the loss of ice and seeks to save glaciers. The transformation and consolidation of these perspectives into the endangered narrative occurred for several reasons. For one, glaciers melted as climate changed over the past century and a half. And this glacier retreat accelerated after about 1980, precisely the moment when ice cores yielded compelling climatic evidence and when global warming awareness increasingly crept into people's consciousness. Glaciers thus offered an apt indicator for global warming. Nevertheless, retreating glaciers and science were not enough to generate compassion for the ice or to stimulate efforts to save melting glaciers. Potential glacier-related disasters such as glacial lake outburst floods and rising sea levels worried some about the global impacts of melting glaciers. Additionally, inspiration for action stemmed, at least in part, from Westerners' longstanding view of glaciers as active and alive, constantly moving, with character and behaviors, as monsters, snakes, and ailing friends. Glaciers' personality made people care about accelerating glacier retreat. Most important, though, people have worried about glacier loss because they themselves will lose something if the ice disappears. In other words, glaciers became endangered because they are both valuable and consumable. History made a broad range of groups—from mountaineers and scientists to artists and environmentalists—value glaciers on many levels and consume them in diverse ways.

Mark Carey is assistant professor of history at Washington and Lee University, where he teaches Latin American and environmental history. After finishing his PhD in history at the University of California, Davis, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, he is completing a book manuscript on the social and environmental history of glacier retreat in twentieth-century Peru.

NOTES

For helpful comments that improved this essay, I thank Kurt Cuffey, Steve Fountain, Jeff Lydon, Georg Kaser, Nathan Sayre, Mark Cioc, and two anonymous readers for Environmental History. I am very grateful to the S. V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, for generously providing time and funding to write this article.

^1. John Muir, letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, Dec. 11, 1871, in The Life and Letters of John Muir, ed. William Frederic Badè (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924), chap. 8.

^2. The full text of Al Gore's speech is at http://clinton3.nara.gov/WH/EOP/OVP/speeches/glacier.html (accessed 17 July 2006). Gore reiterates, refines, and broadens these glacier comments in the recent film, An Inconvenient Truth (2006). For other studies on twentieth-century glacier retreat in Glacier National Park, see Gregory T. Pederson et al., "Decadal-Scale Climate Drivers for Glacial Dynamics in Glacier National Park, Montana, USA," Geophysical Research Letters 31 (2004): L12203; Tom Yulsman, "Meltdown," Audubon 105 (2003): 38–43.

^3. For just some examples of glacier discussions within the recent avalanche of popular books on global warming, see Mark Bowen, Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate Change in the World's Highest Mountains (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); and Mark Lynas, High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis (New York: Picador, 2004).

^4. For a compilation of recent glacier news articles, see the National Snow and Ice Data Center "Cryosphere in the News Archive" page at http://nsidc.org/news/archives/cryosphere_archive.html.

^5. Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 5–6.

^6. Donald Kennedy and Brooks Hanson, "Ice and History," Science 311, no. 5768 (2006): 1673.

^7. Nathan F. Sayre, Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest: Species of Capital (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), 3–25.

^8. Exceptions include Spencer R. Weart, "On Depicting Global Warming," Environmental History 10 (2005): 770–75; and James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

^9. Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005); Julie Cruikshank, "Glaciers and Climate Change: Perspectives from Oral Tradition," Arctic 54 (2001): 377–93; Stephen J. Pyne, The Ice: Journey to Antarctica (1986; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); and Peter G. Knight, "Glaciers: Art and History, Science and Uncertainty," Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 29 (2004): 385–93. More typical examples focusing either on the last two decades or pre-1850 include Eric G. Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996); Robert E. Rhoades, Xavier Zapata Ríos, and Jenny Aragundy Ochoa, "Mama Cotacachi: History, Local Perceptions, and Social Impacts of Climate Change and Glacier Retreat in the Ecuadorian Andes," in Darkening Peaks: Glacial Retreat Science and Society, ed. Ben Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian Luckman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), chap. 16.

^10. My conceptualization of historical agency draws on both environmental history and Science and Technology Studies (STS). See, for example, Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Ted Steinberg, "Fertilizing the Tree of Knowledge: Environmental History Comes of Age," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35 (2004): 265–77; Richard White, "From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History," The Historian 66 (2004): 557–64; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, and Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Kristin Asdal, "The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-Constructivist Challenge to Environmental History," History and Theory 42 (2003): 60–74.

^11. For wilderness critiques, see William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996), 69–90; and J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate: An Expansive Collection of Writings Defining Wilderness From John Muir to Gary Snyder (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). For analyses of Western science, see Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For mountaineering critiques, see Susan R. Schrepfer, Nature's Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); Sherry B. Ortner, Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Reuben Ellis, Vertical Margins: Mountaineering and the Landscapes of Neoimperialism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

^12. Candace Slater, "Amazonia as Edenic Narrative," in Uncommon Ground, 130; see, also, Slater's introduction in Candace Slater, ed., In Search of the Rain Forest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

^13. This connection of environmental narratives with power is well analyzed in Douglas R. Weiner, "A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of Environmental History," Environmental History 10 (2005): 409; Krista M. Harper, "Introduction: The Environment as Master Narrative: Discourse and Identity in Environmental Problems," Anthropological Quarterly 74 (2001): 101–03; Linda Nash, "The Changing Experience of Nature: Historical Encounters with a Northwest River," Journal of American History 86 (2000): 1600–01; Diana K. Davis, "Potential Forests: Degradation Narratives, Science, and Environmental Policy in Protectorate Morocco, 1912–1956," Environmental History 10 (2005): 211–38; and James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

^14. Mark Carey, "Living and Dying With Glaciers: People's Historical Vulnerability to Ava-lanches and Outburst Floods in Peru," Global and Planetary Change 47 (2005): 122–34.

^15. This analysis of global warming follows critiques of wilderness and conservation campaigns in which scholars have tried to "encourage environmentalists to rethink some of their own most basic assumptions about nature and its meanings." See William Cronon, "Foreword to the Paperback Edition," in Uncommon Ground, 22.

^16. These glacier details come from Michael Hambrey and Jürg Alean, Glaciers, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

^17. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), chap. 8. Of course, alpine residents themselves did not consider mountains as backward or hostile, and other mountainous regions of Europe outside the Alps also exist. For an analysis of them, see J. R. McNeill, The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

^18. Quoted in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), 130. Also see Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (London: Granta Books, 2000), 4–12.

^19. Matthes invented the term "Little Ice Age" in 1939 to describe a period of "moderate glaciation" following the warmest period of the Holocene, the Medieval Warm Period. See F. E. Matthes, "Report of Committee on Glaciers, April 1939," Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 20 (1939): 518–23. For good treatments of the Little Ice Age, see Jean M. Grove, Little Ice Ages: Ancient and Modern (New York: Routledge, 2004); this posthumously released two-volume book updates and expands Grove's previous book, The Little Ice Age (London: Methuen &Co., 1988). Also see Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000); H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995), chaps. 12–13.

^20. Quoted in Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine, 148–49.

^21. For specific analyses of Little Ice Age glacier hazards and Europeans' fears of these advancing alpine glaciers, see J. M. Grove, "Glacier Fluctuations and Hazards," Geographical Journal 153 (1987): 351–57; Lance Tufnell, Glacier Hazards (New York: Longman Group, 1984); H. Holzhauser and H.J. Zumbühl, "Glacier Fluctuations in the Western Swiss and French Alps in the 16th Century," Climatic Change 43 (1999): 224–27; Fagan, The Little Ice Age, chap. 7; and Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine, chap. 4.

^22. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), chaps. 2–3; also see Stephen J. Pyne, How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

^23. For the history of ice age theory and its theorizers, see Edmund Blair Bolles, The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999).

^24. Quotes from Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 127, 128.

^25. Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth: A Play (1943; reprint, New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2003).

^26. H. H. Lamb, Climate: Present, Past and Future, vol. 2: Climatic History and the Future (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1977), 660–62.

^27. Richard Alley, The Two Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 32–33.

^28. Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 80–86.

^29. D. S. Halacy, Jr., Ice or Fire? Surviving Climatic Change (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 175.

^30. For the classic work on this intellectual, artistic, and aesthetic transformation of mountain regions in general, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). See, also, Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind.

^31. Spufford, I May Be Some Time, 16–20, offers a good description of the sublime. For analyses of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literary representations of glaciers, see Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice, chap. 2 (which focuses especially on Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron); Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, chap. 4.

^32. Percy Shelley, "Mont Blanc," on line at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1898.html. For a thorough analysis of glacier representations in Shelley's poem, see Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice, 116–28.

^33. Kenneth Bendiner, "John Brett's 'The Glacier of Rosenlaui'," Art Journal 44 (1984): 243–45.

^34. Details on mountaineering in Europe and North America are from Fleming, Killing Dragons; Schrepfer, Nature's Altars; and Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, chap. 3.

^35. Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (Gutenberg EBook, www.gutenberg.net, 2004 [1880]).

^36. For critical analyses of mountaineering, see Schrepfer, Nature's Altars; Ellis, Vertical Margins; Ortner, Life and Death on Mt. Everest; Deborah Poole, "Landscape and the Imperial Subject: U.S. Images of the Andes, 1859–1930," in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 107–138.

^37. Spufford, I May Be Some Time, 6–7; Pyne, The Ice.

^38. Schrepfer, Nature's Altars, 202–04; Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen?

^39. Pyne (The Ice, 155–61) describes this connection of Enlightenment, science, exploration, art, and literature in the Antarctic context. He also touches on it in his essay "The End of the World," which appears in this issue, 649–53.

^40. For scientific and popular overviews of nineteenth-century glaciology, see Garry K. C. Clarke, "A Short History of Scientific Investigations on Glaciers," Journal of Glaciology Special Issue (1987): 4–24; Bolles, The Ice Finders; and Mariana Gosnell, Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), chap. 6.

^41. Bruce Hevly, "The Heroic Science of Glacier Motion," Osiris 11 (1996): 66, 84.

^42. See Callicott and Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate; Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness." For wilderness critiques outside the US, see Stan Stevens, "The Legacy of Yellowstone," in Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas, ed. Stan Stevens (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997), 13–32; and Roderick P. Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles Over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).

^43. Paul D. Sheats, "John Muir's Glacial Gospel," Pacific Historian 29 (1985): 46; Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen?, chap. 5.

^44. Theodore Catton, Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 17–27, 64–65.

^45. Schrepfer, Nature's Altars, 225.

^46. For histories of the science and social awareness of global warming, see Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming; Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change; and Mark Maslin, Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). U.S. poll data from Weart, p. 156.

^47. J. H. Mercer, "West Antarctic Ice Sheet and CO2 Greenhouse Effect: A Threat of Disaster," Nature 271 (1978): 321–25.

^48. Claude Lorius et al., "The Ice Core Record: Past Archive of the Climate and Signpost to the Future," Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 338 (1992): 227.

^49. Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, 49.

^50. EPICA Community Members, "Eight Glacial Cycles from an Antarctic Ice Core," Nature 429 (2004): 623–28.

^51. For ice coring history, see Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine, chap. 3 (quoted on p. 17); Paul Andrew Mayewski and Frank White, The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change (Hanover: University of New Hampshire/University Press of New England, 2002), chap. 2; Bernhard Stauffer, "The Greenland Ice Core Project," Science 260 (1993): 1766–77; G. de Q. Robin, "Ice Cores and Climatic Change," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 280 (1977): 143–68; and Clarke, "A Short History of Scientific Investigations on Glaciers," 11–14.

^52. L. G. Thompson et al., "The Little Ice Age as Recorded in the Stratigraphy of the Tropical Quelccaya Ice Cap," Science 234 (1986): 361–364; Izumi Shimada et al., "Cultural Impacts of Severe Droughts in the Prehistoric Andes: Application of a 1,500-Year Ice Core Precipitation Record," World Archaeology 22 (1991): 247–70.

^53. Quotations are from Kevin Krajick, "Ice Man: Lonnie Thompson Scales the Peaks for Science," Science 298 (2002): 518. The most detailed biographical information about Lonnie Thompson comes from Bowen, Thin Ice; see, also, Gosnell, Ice: The Nature, the History, chap. 9.

^54. Wallace S. Broecker, "Glaciers that Speak in Tongues and Other Tales of Global Warming," Natural History 110 (2001): 60. For a technical introduction to glacier-climate dynamics, see Johannes Oerlemans, Glaciers and Climate Change (Exton, PA: A.A. Balkema Publishers, 2001).

^55. For these historical milestones in glacier-climate research, see Clarke, "A Short History of Scientific Investigations on Glaciers" 9; Grove, Little Ice Ages, 2; W. O. Field and Calvin J. Heusser, "Glaciers. Historians of Climate," Geographical Review 42 (1952): 337–45; and Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine.

^56. For a good overview of current glaciological research and future directions, see R. G. B