We recognize today that single stories are problematic. Instead, they’re known more for their single association with climate change. Glaciers are increasingly reduced, simplified and detached from environments, from people, from socio-political-cultural processes.

Where there are glaciers, there are people (even in Antarctica!), and the two have been interacting for the entirety of human history.īut I have researched glaciers for decades worldwide, and I can tell you glaciers are not just thermometers, and ice does not “just melt.” As glaciers are more and more iconized with climate change, everything else about a glacier seems to fall away - their immense diversity and their complexity.

It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold from solid to liquid. Photo: Stephan Mantler.Īs geophysicist Henry Pollack says, “Nature’s best thermometer, perhaps its most sensitive and unambiguous indicator of climate change, is ice … Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. The ice caves of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier are a draw for tourists. So when I say a glacier has melted X amount, I’m also saying climate change has altered something X amount.

Glaciers act as veritable proxies or stand-ins for climate change - to measure, assess or explain glaciers is to also measure, assess or explain climate change. And, by virtue of glaciers’ relationship with climatic changes, what I’ve observed is that more and more, the line between the two blurs. Substantial evidence tells us that human-made climatic changes are to blame, and the unhappy marriage between immense ice loss and climate change has led glaciers to be increasingly recognized as one of the most visible icons of global environmental changes. Each glacier is exceptionally diverse, each fluctuating in multitudes of ways to local, regional and global environmental dynamics. Today, we have over 400,000 glaciers and ice caps scattered across Earth, over 5.8 million square miles of ice. This vanishing ice holds staggering consequences. Glaciers worldwide that have existed for centuries are disappearing in human timescales - our lifetimes. These relationships deserve our attention and respect, says glaciologist M Jackson. Þorvarður Árnason If we want to effectively respond to climate change, we must understand the complex connections that exist between humans and ice.

Vanishing earth