Edge Effects is produced the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), a research center within the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studiesat the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Who is Killing
the Glaciers?
From Glacier Funerals
to Glacier Autopsies
BY ZACHARY PROVANT AND MARK CAREY · PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 3, 2022
Memorials for Dead Glaciers
Clark, dead. Pizol, dead. Okjökull, dead. A recent string of mountaintop deaths has inspired a new ceremony: glacier funerals… they have been prominently mourned under international spotlight. The spectacle of glacier funerals provokes an important question: do they actually inspire action, accountability, and justice?
Glacier memorials first kicked off in Iceland in August 2019, when about 100 people clamored up a mountainside to mourn the death of Okjökull— Icelandic glaciologist Oddur Sigurdsson pulled a death certificate from his backpack. He announced the cause of the glacier’s demise: “excessive heat” and “humans.”
Following Okjökull’s memorial, concerned citizens and scientists laid other glaciers to rest, including the Pizol Glacier in Switzerland in 2019 and the Clark Glacier in Oregon in 2020...The organizer, Anders Carlson, collected a vial of meltwater from this Cascades glacier, which he said had become “a rotting carcass of its former self.” He then put the vial into a coffin, draped it with black cloth, and positioned it in front of the stark-white state capitol building in Salem…
Glacier funerals inspire stories through an intense blend of melancholia, urgency, and spectacle. Tearful mourners under black veils stand alongside “Demand Climate Action Now” pickets. News articles showcase dramatic images of funeral processions..but fail to explain what drives the “glacier apocalypse”.
They don’t tap into the justice-focused ice work, like in cryopolitics or cryogenics or the ice humanities... In short, glacier funerals evade a key question: Do glaciers just die, or are they killed?
Who is Killing the Glaciers?
Alongside the vast body of research showing the environmental injustices of climate change impacts, a different branch of research works to identify the culprits causing glacier deaths...
Science journalist Jane Hu explains attribution science with a helpful analogy: “Just as medical researchers can study how smoking cigarettes changes people’s risk of lung cancer by comparing data from smokers and nonsmokers, attribution scientists compare events on our planet with those on a hypothetical ‘Planet B,’ one that is untouched by greenhouse gas emissions.” While attribution research may not yet be fully utilized by all climate scientists, it has evolved enough over the last decade to pinpoint the effects of human-caused climate change. For example, attribution science has been used to show that climate change has worsened spring frosts that damage vineyards in France and that Hurricane Harvey in Texas had 18% more rain as a result of anthropogenic warming.
What we ultimately need are stories that ignite change...a more precise glacier autopsy—one with a detailed accounting of the causes and culprits behind the death of ice—is critical. Attribution science, climate accountability, carbon inventories, and climate litigation can inject responsibility into stories about glacier funerals. Accountability is an important step toward climate justice, and stories that foreground accountability recast people from sentimental, agent-less stories about melting glaciers as culprits, victims, and fighters.
