With frozen glaciers disappearing into the oceans at an unprecedented rate, the rise of an ecotourism of glacier viewing is hardly unexpected. The new heights of glacial melt that are feared for much of the arctic this summer–even if the disappearance of sea-ice predicted by late summer won’t be radically different or worse from previous years–suggest cause for environmental alarm as monumental as the burning of dry forests that spew smoke across the nation. The arctic sublime is, perhaps, more deeply rooted in our imagination, as the fascination of the edges and margins of the arctic as a timeless region and place. The contraction of those margins by melting glaciers suggests that our notion of acclimating to a wandering pole seems more time-stamped, in the mode of current maps, than timeless, a warping as well as a melting of time and space.
The disappearing glaciers map conflicts between two logics–a globalized world of smooth surfaces of the Anthropocene, and image of a timeless arctic wild, whose purity is frozen and lies preserved just beyond our reach. The blurred boundary of the Arctic Sea is a consequence of the blurring of boundaries wrought by globalization: warming temperatures that have been created by escalating emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gasses are creating an age of global melting–and glacial melting–where icebergs are fewer and harder to see, and the sea-ice in the former Arctic Ocean is far less likely to strand ships. The erosion of an edge of the Arctic circle, already nudged north at a rate of just under fifteen meters a year beyond 66.6° N, is mapped in anticipation of arctic melting, a surface of pristine blue bound by a line–despite questions of the margins of thawing permafrost, meltwater flow, ice-thinning or of sea-ice. Drawing a clear line for the Arctic Circle is the vestigial inheritance of print cartography, whose conceptual authority hinders us from mapping the critical margins in which glacial meltwater moves into the northern oceans and warming northern seas.
The shrinking mass of the patchwork of glaciers, mapped in part by satellite, reveal rates of disintegration more rapid rates than the ice-sheet of Greenland, in the new millennium, marked by accelerated reduction of mass, of hydrologic consequences that demand local observation. After twenty-five consecutive years of sea-ice los, late season warming created melt conditions for over a third of Greenland’s ice sheet, revealing the new face of global warming of spreading icemelt–as well as surface melt on 36% of the ice-sheet, surface melt at its highest altitudes were fed by surface air temperatures the sixth warmest since 1900. After sustained sense of limited loss of glacial mass in previous decades, among small glaciers over three decades 1961-90, even given the difficulties of accurately mapping time-series for glacier mass before satellite observations, increase loss of ice mass set off alarms. The far lower mass lost by glaciers sharply contrasts to current levels of ice-melt and widespread glacier loss, here alarmingly noted by a cautionary color ramp of orange-red.
Accelerated Global Glacier Mass Loss in the Early Twenty-First Century/Hugonnet, in Nature (2021)
To be sure, the increased interest in preserving a recording of the arctic’s vital signs–the changing soundscape of ice crackling under ships, and glacial waterflow, seek to register the vitality of the glacial landscape to bring the arctic regions to greater prominence, relating to the new scale of anthropogenic disturbance able to be sensed by their own “vital signs”: the Arctic Report Card issued annually by the U.S. National Oceanic and Aeronautic Administration since 2006 offers a rich database virtually accessible of the disturbances of the global arctic,–although the report of 2018 predicted the entrance of the arctic into “uncharted territory” as a lead research scientist of NOAA warned, with an irony firmly based on new data of surface-air temperatures, sea ice decline, wildlife mortality to erosion to ice-melt that had previously long been difficult to access. If we feel the weird weather systems as a local deviation, more than a consequence of arctic melting, they may remind us how rooted our sense of place is in the frozen remoteness of the upper north, whose icepack reflects more than absorbs solar temperatures–as melting stands to end the idea of a frozen timeless purity, as the survival of sea ice more than a few years precipitously declined, even if some fraction of the Arctic Ocean seem to still remain frozen year-round.
How can we chart these uncharted territories in maps, or can we develop the tools for a conjectural cartography as sufficiently orienting even while we face the prospect of a migration of due north–a change as radically unsteadying for mappers as removing the carpet from beneath our feet? The long-term movement of magnetic North toward Siberian islands is indeed on an uncertain course–
–shifting from Thoreau’s time to the Siberian shores, making us rethink arctic margins, and indeed the stability we were long accustomed to associate with magnetic north, a motion partly tied to melting, and which makes us take stock of glacial health, whose vitality has less to do with warmth.
Conceptual artists as Julian Charrière, whose Swiss origins have perhaps left him particularly sensitive to Alpine landscapes and glaciers, have made it an artistic mission to preserve the fragility of ice fields, sea ice, and underseas sounds of the new Arctic, offering a sense-based record of melting in images able to act as repositories of a new visual relation to a fast-melting world in collaboration with scientific explorers of the reduced levels of sea ice and growing glacial melt.
Julien Charrière, Towards No Earthly Pole, 2019 in Erratic (SFMOMA)
The arctic landscape is also made more alive by the sounds of arctic landscapes, all too easily black-boxed from our world in a denial of climate change. The sounds of glacial calving that are so resonant with the catastrophic consequences of polar glacial collapse offer a sonic register of a collapsing arctic world; the multiplication of YouTube videos of glacial calving seem a yearning to make more concrete the awesome spectacle of glacial collapse. Attempts to extract ice cores from glaciers to preserve the evidence of climactic history before it melts has also inspired attempts to record the interior sounds of glacial vitality in sound recordings of the snapping, crackling, and crevassing as evidence of glacial vitality not from the margins but center of the arctic landscape that remains–somewhat akin to how bioacousticians recorded Humpback Whales circa 1970 to preserve vocalizations as ecological affirmations of balene humanism, revealing sonic expressive sequencing and improvisation never before heard by an innovative “hydrophone” in a nature recording so famous to grow consciousness for a global moratorium on whale hunting.
But if the perception of the aesthetic beauty of whale calls were background music for mindfulness, the melting margins of the Arctic are rarely mapped they demand–or mapped at all, as they are so reduced.
Global warming stands to erase the arctic as an extreme frontier, and to change the flow of sea temperatures in ways that will dramatically accelerate sea-level rise. The archetypal romantic Arctic explorer, Robert Walton, marveled at the “beauty and delight” of desolate frozen fields, even as his blood froze in his veins on the Greenland whaling ship he commandeered to reach the North Pole. , marveled at its “beauty and delight.”
Only as Walton’s whaling ship is trapped by floating ice and cannot move did his arctic reveries conclude; before the ice breaks and frees the ship, he spied Victor Frankenstein, the sled on which he pursued the monster who had perhaps duped Frankenstein to follow him to the North Pole, impervious to temperatures his creator could not survive. The novel inspired by ghost stories may invite us to track the monster from a ship that lay at the edges of sea-ice in the Arctic Ocean–
Walton’s Course and the Edge of Average Arctic Ice Edge from March through August in Nordic Sea/ ACSYS Historical Ice Chart Archive, Boulder CO, Frankenstein Atlas by Jason M Kelly
–she was informed by the frustration of numerous polar voyages sponsored by the British Admiralty to the North Pole that were stopped by ice sheets and icebergs beyond the Barents Sea. Mary Shelley seems to have mapped a desolate arctic landscape to conclude Frankenstein’s search for forbidden knowledge, perhaps as she revised the manuscript with grading contributions from Percy in England, and access to the records of the Admiralty. The arctic setting became the fatal conclusion for the “Modern Prometheus,” before the backstory of Frankenstein raising ghosts by alchemical incantations send him to fuse Paracelsianism and natural science that would long haunt histories of science. The very setting of Alpine glaciers where Shelley conceived the story found their conclusion in the arctic, both haunted by accelerated glacier loss. The register of glacial melt is a current register of the Anthropocene, whose own Promethean character is only just beginning to be understood. The northern arctic margins where Frankenstein and Walton crossed paths was still continued to be charted through the mid-nineteenth century, the Polar Sea resistant to staking territorial claims as solid land, the sea-ice unable to be mapped within northern polar seas–
British Admiralty Chart of North Polar Sea (1855, rev 1874) noting Coasts British Explorers Discovered pre-1800 (Dark Blue) and post-1800 (Brown); noting coasts explored by Americans, Germans, Swedes and Austrians 1859-74 in Red Ink
–in ways that we are currently coming to terms with as a mapping of ice-melt and sea-ice melting, in a horror story of its own that has transcended territorial claims.
The current landscape of arctic melting frustrates bounding the arctic by a simple line. Rather, we are challenged to map the rates of glacial retreat and the melting of ice sheets, that stand to erode the sense of the Arctic as a fixed frontier, whose margins are remapped as remote sensing provides data of the increasing rates of melting. While icy breezes refreshed Walton’s senses as he passed to the Arctic, if not overwhelming him with the vision of filling long-nurtured hopes of sea-faring at the edges of a geographic extremity, we lack map signs adequate to register fears of polar melting in our warming world. Niko Kommenda’s 2021 visualization in the header to this post of the increased rates at which global glaciers melt bravely tries to sound the alarm. The schematic projection captures the terror of the impending glacial melting, a flattening of the polar surfaces of the globe, where trans-arctic commercial pathways are finally being imagined and plotted, two hundred years after seeking in vain for a northwest passage across Arctic Seas.
By 2016, as the ice had already retreated from the pole, nine hundred passengers had signed up for spots on a luxury cruise liner, the Crystal Serenity, to sail through the sudden access that low sea ice offered to the lost geographic imaginary of the Northwest Passage, a sea route around the top of North America that had become open to commercial ships, and has since become a route of commercial yachting, if it was only first crossed in 1906 if attempted long earlier. While once passing some 36,000 ice-bound islands, some seven routes have opened for ships today, and innumerable routes by yacht, stopping at the site of the unfortunate 18445 Franklin expedition and recent polar catastrophes,
Jason van Bruggen/Boat Iternational
as well as some pretty spectacular vies of calving glaciers, but demand constant navigation of the shifting sea-ice and floating glaciers by yachtsmen, and super yachts able to cross sea ice who often retrace the popular “Amundsen route” first made in 1906, when sea-ice retreat allows navigation.
Entry to the Northwest Passage in 2022/Jason van Bruggen
As we anticipate the ice-free arctic, we will brace for a shifting global axis, potentially upsetting our mapping tools, and a rapid rise in global sea-level, if the melting rate of sea ice proceeds at currently revised rates. As the shifts in global mass distribution due to the melting of glaciers and polar ice-sheet seem to have progressed to throw earth off its axis, we are increasingly disoriented not only by raging fires, or torrential rain, but by ice-melt–the sea ice of the arctic is predicted to melt by the summer of 2030, polar archipelagos melting two decades earlier than once projected, when 2050 was projected as a watershed for an ice-free Arctic Ocean, even in low-emissions scenarios. (Observed sea-ice area in the arctic dramatically plunged 1980-2020, but even in the face of such authoritative models, it is difficult to imagine the disappearing act to conclude.)
Although global mapping companies are beset with worries at the possibilities of a wandering and irregularly migrating or wobbly north pole, as extreme melting has sent the arctic regions and magnetic north into uncharted waters, we rightly worry we are headed not only into an era of submerged landscapes, but unstable relation to old orienting points. The “post-glacier” era not only has started to shift stability of the earth’s axis, on account of the readjustment of mass melting of the polar ice-sheet and global glaciers have already caused in the new millennium, but may well be tilting our bearings and sense of being in the world. The unsteady migration of the North Pole in the new millennium is a deep unsteadying, warping our sense of mapping and being in the world, whose strange behavior has accelerated since the nineteenth century in unsteadying ways, moving from Canada toward Russia in a weird consequence of globalized economies that may be accelerating its motion and force necessary geodetic adjustments to our GPS. If the geodetic maps that Henry David Thoreau devised for Walden Pond were seen by some readers as a comic send-up of the mapping of national waters of the U.S. Coastal Survey, magnetic north offered a framework for transcendentalism for Thoreau to map Walden Pond and the adjacent lake country,–tangible and quantitative even if it diverged from the compass, an accurate frame of reference for surveying and an ethical framework and way of life to liberated from social constraints, a firm foundation to a imagine a more ethical world, firmer than the sailors who vainly sought to arrive at the polar cap.
4. The nineteenth-century American explorer Elisha Kent Kane’s accounts of arctic icebergs that had trapped the search vessel on which he was surgeon soon became a media sensation of sorts in the mid-nineteenth century. Indicating the global lines of the arctic that Kane courted vicariously for his audiences in newspaper articles, public speeches, and indeed the watercolors and drawings he displayed on the lecture circuit and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society, of which his father served as secretary from 1828-48, seems to have engaged the nation’s attention to the arctic in ways that appear destined to parallel the upcoming attention to the glacial retreat by which the quite sudden melting of long-frozen polar ice merits action in an age of global warming. Despite a growth of climate expertise, we are painfully without guides to the disappearance of glacial markers and glacial melt that has already changed the axis on which the earth spins.
It is disturbing to find a landscape once seen as timeless to be mapped as time-stamped. Can the awe of the arctic landscape still hold awe? Elisha Kent Kane’s audacious account of first-hand contact with the Humboldt Glacier–now the Sermersuaq Glacier–off of Greenland, while now forgotten, was so vivid Henry David Thoreau even felt jealousy, as he doubted polar explorers like Grinell, for all their public celebration, had ever needed to travel to Greenland’s coast. (Thoreau echoed Ralph Waldo Emerson’s doubts in “Self-Reliance” about the value of currents fad for travel abroad, calling the rage for visiting Rome or Greece less a real destination than “a fool’s paradise” that follows from neglect of one’s own backyard: “the soul is no traveller, the wise man stays home;” the rage for ravel as an amusement only leads only to travel away from one’s true self.) The conflict or the terrain for conflict had perhaps been mapped: among the personal papers of the doctor served as senior medical officer in a polar expedition, Bones McCoy to Grinnell’s more elegant Capt. Kirk, except that Kane was chosen to head the attempted polar expedition that followed recent maps of the open polar sea, imagining they might find a northwest passage, before they were trapped by sea ice, and forced to abandon their ship for a long trek south, subsisting in the wild on walruses and having dressed in animal skins amidst the frozen landscape of towering icy peak.
The U.S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: A Personal Narrative (1853)
Kent Kane had fronted the wild as a scientist-explorer published in a personal narrative of 1853, a year before Thoreau’s condensed narrative of the twenty-six months spent at Walden Pond, based on lectures that had made good on many newspaper accounts he had filed while at sea. In his escape narrative of the arctic, the surgeon rejected scientific jargon to evoke the terror of arctic landscapes of an uninhabited wild. He rendered its uncanny spectacle by watercolors to capture his fronting of the uncanny unknown arctic wilds that escaped the impoverished dimensions even of architectural panorama, placing adiences in a harrowing story barely avoiding shipwreck on massive icebergs that threatened the vessel in arctic seas where the compass itself froze as a romance of confronting the nature of a frozen north, as if the snowy lands were uninhabited, as a Robinson Crusoe of the northern hemisphere, in a melodrama against magnified elements.
Ship Wrecked on an iceberg, from Elisha Kent Kane, Arctic Explorations in the Years 1853, 1854, 1855
Emerson’s maxim about the vanity of travel is often cited proverbially, perhaps imbued with new tones in an age of globalization, apart from the Sage of Concord proviso about the pleasures of solitude that “Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home.” The range of remote observation that we are able to access about the arctic this warming summer–and warming summers previous–are cause for alarm, as the number of glaciers have declined rather precipitously in recent decades, as the oceans have warmed, and their melting across the northern hemisphere have contributed and stand to contribute more to the rising of sea-level, as well as exhausting one of the largest storehouses of freshwater in frozen form.
Whether or not the heroes of arctic exploration never fully explored their own back yards with due diligence or not, Thoreau framed a prospective from Walden on the world, as he cultivated his perceptual abilities–refining his own study of the local landscape and its morphological characteristics. To be sure, Thoreau appreciated his own backyard as a source of rich meditation informed by his avid reading of Darwin’s discussion of Patagonia, Rev. William Gilpin’s accounts of the depth of Scottish coasts and Lochs, as well as Kane’s spectacular accounts of his approach of Greenland’s glacier, to view icebergs calving from its coast at first hand. The edge of Walden Pond emerged something of a standard by which he was to judge them all, and for each natural history text (from Lyellian geography to historical bird migrations pioneered by Gilbert Whyte’s Selbourne) to measure Walden Pond against. They offered a basis for Thoreau’s mind to travel, while he was rooted on the banks of Walden Pond, and even to imagine, the actual engineering of Walden Pond and the ponds of Sudbury Plain as excavated by glacial retreat, long before the “Hyperborean” workmen (Irish day laborers) came to export its precious if undervalued ice for a global market.
Kane’s sensational voyages to the arctic had made him an American hero, against whose narrative of an arctic picturesque narrative or so, Thoreau might well have sought to define himself against, but in the past sixty years, Thoreau has remained the model of local observation. Recently, as one tries to process the extent of global warming, remote sensing gives some strength to Thoreau’s point–and Emerson’s–given the possibility of considering the world from one place, without braving the elements to risk being trapped by sea-ice and ice floes of the arctic north in the rather sensational manner of Elish Kent Kane, heroized in his time as a public speaker, American hero, and arctic explorer, before Thoreau began to gain popularity on the lecture circuit in Massachusetts. He was a bit of a competitor, and arrived in Boston with the huge drawings he had made of arctic icebergs that his ship had encountered and seen at first hand as an actual arctic sublime.
Arctic Glacier, Melville Bay from US Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin Grinnell (1853)/ American Philosophical Society Library
Thoreau famously prized Walden Pond as a site of purity from which to apply himself to watching the world, perhaps recuperated in the enthusiasm for viewing glaciers today in an era of ever-decreasing contact with the wild, the uneasiness of watching the retreating remaining glaciers in the warming waters of the northern seas is more than tinged with a sense of melancholy, capturing the sight of the few remaining glaciers and icebergs, and summoning what is let of Thoreau’s deep admiration of the wild. Thoreau would indeed be shocked at a shifting North Pole as a surveyor who, Patrick Chura has shown, prided himself on determining magnetic North by a “true meridian” if modest in many ways: accessing the “true meridian” was a more elevated sense of moral purpose and direction, as he navigated at night-time by the North Star that escaped slaves followed to secure their freedom. Thoreau was proud of his exactitude and precision as a surveyor of farms and of the woodlots around Walden Pond, mapped “so extensively and minutely that I now see it mapepd in my mind’s eye,” he wrote in 1858, to plot his motion across lots’ property lines,–as if the exactness of magnetic north was warranted to navigate the woods accurately.
Thoreau prized the ability to detect the undisturbed wilds of America just outside of Concord, Massachusetts, and in his own back yard, cultivating his perceptions of the wilds of the continent that still survived even in the age of the railroad and outdoor lighting, the timeless glaciers–or seemingly timeless iceberg–offer one of the last sites of the wild, a fast disappearing margin of nature, in a warming world and a world of warming oceans. Now, rather than haunted by icebergs, we are more likely to be threatened by prospects of glacial retreat. In an increasingly warming haunted by polar melting and glacial retreat, twenty-eight trillion tons of global ice melted between 1994 and 2017, raising the prospect of melting of the 70% of the earth’s freshwater stored in permafrost, ice-sheets, glaciers, and ice caps. Remote sensing led NASA to say almost elegiacally, “goodbye, glaciers” in 2012, finding almost 60% of ice loss melting in the northern hemisphere, and much in the Americas, northern Canada having lost 67 billion tons of ice in the previous seven years, southern Alaska 46 billion tons, and Patagonia 23 billion tons. The skills of engineering by which Thoreau, who built his own house in rusticated style, recovering the shingles from an Irish worker as Romans might reuse pieces of ancient buildings, fancied the environmental engineering feats by which glacial retreat had sculpted the ponds he boated, swam, drank, and skated in winter. If Kane had been inspired on his expedition by maps of an ice-free open arctic sea, we have trouble not standing in fear of the prospect.
Augustus Heinrich Peterman, 1852
At the same time as Kane set sail in search of Grinnelle, or 1855, Peterman combined the arctic panorama with intense cartographic scrutiny of the islands and icebergs of the frozen landscape, trying to preserve a navigable open arctic, combining art and cartography to tempt travelers to the prospect of Humboltdian voyages to the many islands and archipelagos of a partly frozen north.
Peterman, Karte des Arktischen Archipel’s der Parry Inseln, 1855
1. The scale of global melting is the negative image of globalization, haunted by a hidden story of dizzyingly increasing global icemelt and global melting. As increasingly warmer waters enter the arctic regions it melts more sea ice, allowing more sunlight to enter the arctic ocean, whose contracting margins trigger a feedback loop as more icemelt reduces the margins of arctic sea ice whose effects we are hardly able to process, let alone to confront.
T. Slater et al, (2021), Copernicus
Indeed, we are haunted by the image of glacial melting far more than we might imagine, and wherever we live. For the mapping of glacial melting–suggested by the data vis heading this post–is best understood as something of a negative map, as well as a map of tragic if not irreversable loss. It is a map that we will not need to travel far to see–per NASA, which has been monitoring glacial loss and ice sheets’ weight since 2002, the prospect of all glaciers and ice sheets melting would provoke sea level-rise over sixty meters or 195 feet. The message of the remote sensing GRACE satellites provided from 2002 to 2017, and GRACE-Follow On satellites after 2018, have yet to hit home, Emerson might say, perhaps as even accurate monitoring is only offering provocation to assess the shrinking margins of the arctic on the ensuing loss of habitat, warming ocean currents, that send ever less cold water to the deep ocean to trigger upwellings of nutrients, and indeed land erosion that rising sea-level can provoke.
Despite its persuasive power, this map remains largely negative, as it tracks ice loss, without the more terrifying consequences of a greater degree of icemelt, with significant consequences downstream. We imagine glaciers as if they had edges, but the margins of ice melt are an image globalization and the only recently conceivable prospect of the margins of arctic melting The arctic must be understood by its margin, not a line, whose changing margins–seasonal margins, margins of melting, and margins of glacial coasts–shown as ‘dripping’ in the header to this post, a projection revealing how much the loss of ice due to global warming has accelerated in the north.
Faced with the burgeoning data of 267 gigatonnes of ice-melt as glaciers and ice caps recede, Niko Kommenda hoped to process remote sensing by statistical data profiles to render the loss of ice at specific as a sequence of spikes at fixed transects. Kommenda long considered possibilities of visualizing glacial melt as a visual projects editor at the Guardian, but the prospect of a recent doubling of rates of ice-melt over the previous two years suggested a need to illustrate the rising rate of flow as a massive shift in the calculus of water flow into global oceans. Recalling the use of spiking red to render rates of mortality of COVID-19 in American cities, if with a downward flow, he mapped a synoptic data vis of global annual change in ice mass. The global continents drip red, in a gripping distribution of the image of ice-loss that almost recall a geo-referenced remix of the classic Sherwin Williams logo, but of a world whose northern hemisphere was dripping with melting ice, as the small rise of several light blue spots suggest rises in ice mass mostly confined to high altitudes.
The map evokes geodetic take on the familiar Sherwin Williams globalism, repurposing the promise to “cover the earth”: in a projection akin to a transverse Mercator project like WGS84, flattens the earth to a single legible surface, haunted by the specter of nearly inevitable sea-level rise.
Henry Sherwin’s logo was, when it appeared after World War I, in 1919, a rebus signifying the victory of American capitalism and enterprise as it expanded to markets to a European theater, across the Atlantic Ocean, in an iconic image of free enterprise that new no national frontiers–
Cover the Earth indeed! The bold totality of Kommenda’s graphic suggests a bold distillation of international mapping tools, a drip drip drip that is almost unstoppable: rising rates of flow from the melting of global glaciers had doubled form the start of the new millennium, sounding an alarm after the first comprehensive studies of ice rivers revealed at high latitudes more meltwater leeched than the ice sheets of Greenland or Antarctica,–putting glacial thinning into prominence as a result of NASA satellite data. Remote sensing may have revealed one of the greatest historical catastrophes of losses of ice in human history, prompted Kommenda to tote up a compelling balance sheet of losses of frozen mass to embody the alarm glaciologist Romain Hugonnet sounded. The work of Kommenda’s mapping continued, as he focussed on the outlines of glaciers and glacial complexes–“The more accurately we can map glacier outlines, the better we can track their melting due to climate change,” Ann Windnagel of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who has been trying to track the recent reduction of glacial complexes in the Arctic, Iceland, Alaska, Scandinavia, Antarctica, and Central Asia, as well as the Southern Andes, in a global assessment of glacial health–ranking the glaciers’ size and footprints as a long-lasting, enduring flowing mass of ice. To describe the “footprint” of a mobile form may be an unhelpful mixed metaphor, but the inventory of glacial size can map glacial health in relation to glacial fluctuations, ice shelves, ice tongues, ice thickness and ocean temperature, given considerable contribution of glacial melt to sea-level rise–often able to be compared with over 25,000 digitized photographs of glaciers, dating back to the mid-19th century, as a graphic historical reference for glacier extent. By tracking ice bodies and glacial complexes over time, snapshots help appreciate the extent of complexes in different regions.
The awareness of just how much glacial mass had been lost by warming became evident as it set the earth’s axis wobbling off due North in ways that may upset the geodesy on which the global grids we rely in satellite-based mapping rely. The hope to mirror the deep urgency Hugonnet felt to make the remote glaciers more immediate in a multiscalar global water cycle, able to encompass the considerable risks of huge downstream changes in regional hydrology, a fact that Hugonnet appreciates as a long-term resident of the Alps–the fastest melting glaciers offer a microcosm or test case able to contemplate the consequences of a global phenomenon of glacial melting–also known as glacial disintegration, as the over 200,000 global glaciers and glacial complexes have begun quite radically to reduce in their mass and size–releasing a considerable chunk of the world’s freshwater reserves to global oceans.
Although Alpine glaciers are far less thick than their polar counterparts, they risk to by 2050 in current warming scenarios to loose 80-90% of their mass, altering downstream ecosystems by starving them of water, even if not flowing into the open sea. The starving of landscapes from freshwater sources is striking; glacier outlines allow mapping shrinking glacial margins in many regions, including mapping glacier devolution in Alpine areas by a combination of optical imagery and LiDar, as well as old arial photographs, to help to take stock of the loss of about 30% of the volume of forty-eight glaciers in the Austrian Silvretta in Tirol, revealing a rapid recession of glaciers the recent emergency of formerly ice-covered rock face, after gradual glacial retreat, suggesting the loss of a massive repository of frozen freshwater. Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) has already detected a doubling of losses of glacial mass each decade since the 1970s; but the picture of losses at high latitudes and high altitudes needs to be made concrete for those living on near the coasts–despite the North Atlantic anomaly of decelerated mass loss.
Glacial Retreat in Tirol by Digital Elevation Models from 2017 (Black Boundary Lines)
We may lack commensurate memory or metaphors to describe the disastrous consequences of the disappearance of glacial mass, it never having occurred in human history–and any prospect of the growth of glaciers remain quite remote, and if folks continue to feel that “the science is still out on global warming,” the multiple impacts of global thawing will be far more less able to be visualized–or the species that will survive the different possible future scenarios of catastrophic climate change. The scenarios that have been lambasted and demeaned as “theories” but the record-low sea-ice places the survival of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland that are surrounded by bodies of water at extreme risk of accelerated rates of disintegration that may advance to general collapse by 2050–the record lows of winter sea-ice in Antarctica this June 2023, over a million sq km below the previous record low set just the previous year.
We prefer to view the arctic with awe, and at a move. Or are climactic analogies bound to catch up with us, in inescapable ways?
The current burgeoning riverflow as snowpack melts in California, but may well exemplify the potentially catastrophic effects of raging river water throughout the Central Valley. Increased riverflow from the Sierras have not only rendered rivers dangers, but changed habitat, submerging vegetation and prompting fears of erosion on narrowed riverbanks–and indeed the overwhelming of the drainage systems of the state. The changing calculus of icemelt from the Sierras after a boom year of rainfall and snow said to have ended a multi-year drought will challenge the coastal habitats of the state’s rivers, as well as endangering swimmers: surging rivers stand to submerge older habitats, and suggest the need for more local studies of ecosystems and habitat in the face of increasing glacial ice-melt. The stressors are unknown if unimaginable; icebergs suggested to be linked to awe and abundance and timeless abundance, as much as fragility. Alaskan wild lands, coastal ecosystems in Greenland, the Arctic, Labrador and Newfoundland would be threatened in ways impossible to imagine.
2. The glacial landscape is more acessible to those with the means than ever before, who might well imagine themselves as in a Thoreauvian wild. The expansion of polar melting has created, perhaps paradoxically accelerated, a new sort of ecotourism to search of remaining glaciers of solid blue ice. This seems more of a cross, to be sure, between the expeditions of Kent Kane and for purity channeling Thoreau’s attraction to the wilderness and the wild. Thoreau famously realized the glacial origins of Walden’s kettle morraine and glacial origins of Walden Pond’s purity by a glimpse of appreciation of its deep geological time as he stood by its stony shore. While the memorable image of him seeing himself in the snows of the Winter of 1846-7 preceded his epiphany of the glacial drift across New England, he focussed one spring after the pond froze on the almost animate veins and vessels in the patterns snowmelt created on the sandy banks of Walden Pond, more pronounced beneath the recently built railroad track, as the steep banks revealed “foliaceous heaps” whose interpretation he felt might reveal the secret of life, if not “nature in ‘full blast'” that he had so desired to discover in the wild. As he stood before the sandy banks of the Deep Cut beneath the tracks, as if witnessing ancient treasures uncovered by the construction of subway stops in Rome or Naples, he witnessed secrets of seasonal change and revivification of the vital spirits of Walden Pond in the life of inanimate sand, combining his own passion as a self-styled naturalist and interpreter of global history, in ways akin to the glimpses of calving icebergs, or of the epiphanic blue ice of ice ecotourists witness as they paddle off the northern latitudes in search of ecological grandeur of the wildstill able to be accessed or recouped off Newfoundland’s coast.
Thoreau famously found the most opportune moment for mapping the depth of Walden Pond in the midst of the preceding winter months, in January, 1847 when “snow and ice are thick and solid.” That winter, the arrival of over a hundred Irish laborers excavated ice of Walden for Frederic Tudor, the Boston ice-baron, using saws, ploughs, knives, spades, rakes, and pikes to remove some thousand tons of ice a day–and 10,000 tons in one week–that is often contrasted to Thoreau’s contemplation of the local and the infinite value of the priceless purity of the waters of Walden Pond. Tudor exploited the global circulation of ice packed in sawdust by train and ship that fed a global demand booming in the colonies and plantations for ice future cool drinks and ice cream on a far-flung market, in ways that offers an image of an earlier globalism, based on the growth of markets that failed to grasp the priceless value of Walden’s limpid transparency. But if Tudor and Thoreau are often contrasted, the enterprise by which Emerson was relieved to have the prospect of the “increased value” he might gain from his woodlot in Walden Pond by leasing the rights to harvest its ice to the businessman may well have provided Thoreau with a foil Thoreau detected in how Emerson perceived the “prospect” by which his woodlot by Walden Pond might recoup its cost and gain “increased value” to contrast to the thrift and economy by which he cultivated virtue while living in the woodlot quietly–and indeed fashioning a new sort of exemplary life for himself far from his father’s pencil trade or the commerce of Concord or Harvard’s academic halls.
Few sites of purity remain outside the arctic. But Thoreau discovered a method of sustained local observation of ecosystemic change that the melting of arctic glaciers demand. We risk devaluing how fast-disappearing glaciers feed ecosystems and ocean circulation, at the changed margins of arctic landscapes in an age of ocean warming. Indeed, the extent of expanding icemelt triggers not only feedback loops, but habitat loss, coastal erosion, and changing ocean currents that only local observation can track. If the order of neoliberalism dulled our senses to the disappearance of glacial mass, encouraging an era of denial even as arctic ice thinned, before the melting of 2007 trigered a shift in the thickness of sea ice with less ice remaining in the arctic seas from 2005, undermining the structures of glaciers, we are slowly leaving an era of denial in which maps are able to play an important persuasive role–both to rebut climate denialism and to come to terms with the new margins of the arctic, as arctic borderlands long imagined as permanent are poised to erode: by 2010, Greenland’s coast entered into a thin ice regime definitively, with sea-ice thinning in warming waters over the next decade. By 2019, one of the warmest summers in recorded history, Greenland’s ice sheet was losing some 12.5 billion tons of ice a day in the heat of the summer, in one of the largest events of melting since 2012.
Ice Loss in Greenland, 2013-19
If we have to travel ever further north to experience the timelessness of icebergs–“It’s taken them 10,000 years to get here, but you can discover them in just a click with IcebergFinder.com!”–the latest form of ecotourism seeks to celebrate the contact with a fast-disappearing north, whose “very narrow, very thin margins” have become far more narrow in the face of a warming arctic sea, as the surveyor W.V. Maclean told the pianist Glenn Gould, as we watch the ice floes of Hudson Bay. The stoic surveyor, pulling from his pipe, sought, like a modern Virgil, to summon the scarce abundance of the frozen arctic in ways that maps might ignore, for the CBC documentary Gould produced to show the northern reaches of Canada in a modernistic manner by overlapping audio tracks that commensurate with the “lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity” he saw as the role of art. Gathering awe for northern reaches of a nation he saw as generating insufficient awe for many Canadians, Gould clearly channeled his own fascination northward by rail and air, awed by the scarce margins of the northern reaches, the jagged edges of whose the margins of ice, embodied in the pristine barren of ice floes, his documentary reveals as a part of his own conception of art.
Pianist Glen Gould chose as a central subjects of his 1964 CBC Documentary, “The Idea of North,” the cartographer W.V. Maclean, as the surveyor with first-hand expertise of agrarian prospects of northern Canada offered a dry witness to the arctic to invite audiences to the north, far “from the noise of civilization and its discontents,” in an odd use of Freud’s phrase, not as an uncanny, but an the Virgil of unfathomably vast arctic regions entral and on the margins of Canadian identity. The surveyor offered a fitting profundity for the CBC documentary by inviting to reflect on the arctic while hearing a Sibelius symphony, which, despite the thin profit margins, was promoted as a sort of virtue that Canadians had for too long overlooked, daunted by the prospect of extensive rail. despite its thin margins, the arctic was the land of margins, demanding its own poet.
The thinning margins of glaciers and of sea ice are however increasingly hard to convey tranquility. The illusion of the smooth surfaces of global capitalism and markets are perhaps impossible to be reconciled with the jagged edges of arctic ice, or the consequences of the new margins of the arctic, and terrifying realities of the prospect for arctic melting–or global melting, a long neglected component of climate change. If the arctic circle is drifting northward at a rate of 14.5 meters every year, arctic melting accounts for over a third of sea-level rise, and the Antarctic circle shifts south by fifteen meters every year, the warming atmosphere melting long immovable glaciers. Shrinking margins of sea ice have retreated annually, as the Arctic warms four times the rate of the planet, as accelerated Arctic warming in the recent decades–spiking in 1999 and the mid-1980s–suggest that seasonal warming stands to cause massive loss in sea ice that changing arctic margins, and our understandings of the north, challenging earlier simulations and climate modeling.
These are margins that the point-based tools of geospatial technologies are pressed to assess on a local level or “downstream” from the deterioration of the arctic ice-shelf. It is as if we started to loose memories of the past landscape of the north: arctic sea ice has steadily declined since 1979 at the astonishingly rapid rate of 3.5-4.1% per decade. The scarcity of ice in the shifting margins of the north reveals quite different rates of ice melt; warmer waters beside the margins of shores have revealed striking anomalies of ice volume: the levels of sea-ice in May, 2023 were the ninth lowest on record,–considerably below the average of 1979-2022–as the decline of arctic ice elevations, the very age of arctic had precipitously declined by 2016, the “perennial” sea-ice more than two years old now a fraction of what had long been the significant majority of arctic ice.
The consequences felt downstream on local ecosystems, habitat, and coastal health we have yet to map. As impressive as statistical cryosat data on the thickness of ice-sheets across Greenland and arctic regions, we remain fettered by the difficulty of cognitively processing of ice-thickness anomalies, as great as they are, of a pointillistic character–to quote geographer Bill Rankin, whose coining of the term pointillistic cartography may well be steeped in his arctic surveys.
Sea Ice Thickness Anomaly For April 2023, Relative to 1997-2020/CryoSat 2, AWI, v. 2.5I
Only by looking in an iterative, analog fashion at the downstream consequences of habitat and ecological niches can we train our minds to better interpret statistical pixellation of ice-thickness variability, and the consequences of those dark blue pixels that crowd Greenland’s northeastern coast, and much of the Canadian far north on the edges or expanding margins of the once-stable Arctic Circle. Each deep blue dot of a meter and half anomalies in reading the fields of light blue pixels the Interferometric Radar Altimeter notes, where warming waters move north of the arctic circle, driving the rapid rates of ongoing steady shrinking of polar sea ice–and the disappearance of permanent sea ice, to judge by the seasonal retreat of frozen seawater in recent memory from the pole during the past two decades against the 1981-2010 median.
While we isolate this as a northern phenomenon, limited to an “Arctic Sea,” its constitutes nothing less than an undermining of the collective memory of oceans of the flora and fauna who are its residents–perhaps particularly in Alaska and Canada’s north, but also Siberia and Greenland.
Seasonal Extent of Sea-Ice at North Pole against Median (yellow line), September, 1980-2020/ NASA Earth Observatory
The decline of the age of arctic sea ice is a diminution of arctic memory, and a change in the arctic landscape. It was not anticipated however, in ways that may seem to accelerate the fast-changing nature. Despite longstanding convictions of the immunity of Arctic permafrost to global climate change, as if the coldest areas were somehow immunized or inoculated against thawing.
Yet Google Earth Engine datasets have over the last fourteen years indicated a massive increased in arctic landslides triggered by melted ice in the permafrost during the summer months–“thaw slumps” of long frozen matter able to release potent greenhouse gases as methane emissions in the atmosphere and carbon dioxide in the fastest warming areas of the world of the high Arctic are unable to be stopped–reshaping the arctic landscape in ways that may in time lead to the eventual disintegration of the ice sheet. Glacial melting prompts the growth of coastal landslides created by the collapse of rock glaciers long held together by ice–avalanches and landslides grew in 2014-19 across the warming north, catalyzed or triggered by glacial retreat. In the face of such expansive rewriting of the arctic margins, we risk ignoring the more analog, recursive, local observations of wildlife and habitat that Henry David Thoreau, for one, detected at Walden Pond’s margins, preserving tallies of the dates at which irises, lilies and blueberries bloomed around Walden Pond, allowed Charles Davis and Richard Primack to understand and indeed measure the climate change by howh warming’s shifted the dates of flowering of irises and lilie–giving new sense to Thoreau’s stay at Walden as an experiment,–beyond as one of living in nature or refining his own abilities of sense-perception, but providing an experimental baseline to observe the effects of global warming.
The growing margins of glaciers, including ice tongues form from the flow of ice from many northern glaciers in the northern glaciers of Greenland’s ice sheet and the largest southern glaciers track the migration of long-frozen ice to the arctic sea, increasingly visible in the last twenty years. But can we come to terms with the study of their effects outside of similar analog observations?
Greenland’s Melting Ice Sheet/NASA/GSFC
3. The retreat of glacial ice sheets in Greenland, which is melting in a warming ocean past the point of no return, is already losing 255 gigatons of ice each year, 2003-16, and while its melting is not inevitable, its melting–measurable by elevation loss–would increase as its elevation lowers to an ever warmer atmosphere. And as the coast of Greenland, long a source of iceberg transit, seems to melt, he viewing of icebergs, those last remnants of a frozen Arctic Ocean, are tracked not as sites of self-reliance, are crowd-sourced for tourists, as if testimonies still promising access to a divine,–
-as if to arrive at the Walden-like purity of a blue-tinged spectacle of ice off the shores of Labrador or Newfoundland, while they are still visible, still floating as remants in the warming arctic waters.
IcebergFinder.com/Newfoundland and Labrador
There are many reasons for the relatively sudden scarcity of sea ice in the north, and many signals of the growing disappearance of glacial mass. The proliferation of “glacial tongues” in an ever warming atmosphere offers a spectacle of the melting of glacial mass, in to the ocean or freshwater lakes, appendages of frozen glacial water that arise from rising ocean temperatures off of the coast of arctic regions or from the melting of subsurface glacial ice that form ice terraces. If geodetic mapping is often described as a layer of mapped space that exists as if superimposed upon the earth’s surface, the data of deteriorating glacial mass can be understood as a creative form of tracking the remaining glacial ice, mapping is not only “flattening” of the earth’s pathways of commerce, but a dynamic calculus of mapping elevations, routes of ice-loss, and melting rates.
April 7, 2019/Earth.com
Much concern has been devoted (and ink spilled) on the “slippery slope” arguments as invoking catastrophic consequences in sensationalist news designed to trigger alarmist fears in a polarized era where public messaging creates ideological divides, demands to be heeded more than logical fallacies only designed to provoke alarmist reactions. The ice tongues that are shearing off coastal ice in Antarctica, touching warmer waters it freezes marks a loss of glacial mass that might have never been imagined in earlier centuries. Indeed, warming waters suggest a possibility of ice-melt that seems destined to stack the deck against global climate stability, a psychic shock regardless of optimism or pessimism about climate change.
5. How to come to terms with the massive world historical shift of deteriorating glaciers, the crumbling of the frozen timeless artifact? The question is so vast to be perhaps beyond the charge of most cartographers, but deserves a central place in the scope of a “speculative cartography” of mapping the global impact of glacial retreat. It would be a way of mapping a changing way of being in the world, therapeutic in organizing a fast-shifting reaction of climate and human activities, and charting a prospect of the scope and scale of irreversible alterations of the global atmosphere. The fast-changing nature of the arctic offers a better purchase, nonetheless, on the fate of the planet, which geospatial techniques are perhaps inadequate to fully track, assess, and reveal.
But since 2010, the monitoring of global environmental monitoring has crated an escalation of a visual archive of ecosystems and habitat that map trends and allow one to correlate planetary environmental change to human activities on a local and global scale. The existence from 2010 of a platform of the elevation of arctic and antarctic ice sheet and ice shelves can track the consequences of ocean warming, as northern Atlantic temperatures approach record heights, a full degree centigrade above normal, sea surface temperatures four degrees above average–far beyond the anomalies in the North Atlantic already deemed exceptional a six years back, as coastal waters in the Gulf of Maine alarmingly warmed seven times as fast as the global ocean in August months.
August 1-31, 2018
The warming waters of the northern Atlantic were rendered in a striking palette of the point-based readings of temperatures and islands of colder waters. But the relation of land to water–and of glaciers to warming Atlantic seas–raise question of the artfulness of maps in an age of global warming, and the shifting relations of land to sea. For these relations are perhaps ineffectively represented by the lawyers of sea surface temperatures, or even base maps of sovereign space, as once-fixed northern boundary of continents has begun to retreat, and the land-sea divide blurred by ever-greater glacial retreat. Even as new shipping routes are drawn in anticipation of glacial retreats and the melting of arctic regions–only understood in the abstract back in 2013–the increasingly concrete consequences ready to cascade from the inevitability of polar melting.
Reduced Sea-Ice Thickness and Polar Shipping Routes/New York Times, 2017
If navigation risk has been steadily reduced since the 1980s, the increased expansion of shipping routes around Greenland reveal the near absence of sea-ice from a region where ships were once regularly iced in. But the real danger has flipped-from dangers to shipping routes of coastal trade to a growing awareness of the dangers of the dangers of ice-loss, and erosion, that have mapped to the death of vital habitats, keystone species, and erosion of long resilient coastal communities.
The contested questions of polar sovereignty, raised in observations of ocean waters are increasingly associatively if not reflexively linked to oceanic experiences–hurricanes, flooding, and rising seas–that impinge on terrestrial sovereignty are stretched thin as we approach arctic seas at the poles, which can remain contested spaces of overlapping or contested sovereign divides, as argued in an earlier post in this blog that focussed on sovereign claims and the instability of sovereign spaces in an age of global warming–and the warning signs of a century of rising heat. Yet are color ramps sufficient to communicate the cascading events that melting of glaciers and sea-ice trigger, and the cycles of polar warming they are predicted to trigger?
While glacial melting is associated with a casualty of summer months, the low ice levels in Antarctic winters suggest as great alarms as increased extremities of icemelt in the higher northern latitudes. We can look forward to photographs of ever-receding level of arctic sea-ice–currently about the same as last year, but for scientists at Belgium’s UC Louvain, potential record-lows of just under three million sq km–295 sq km of sea-ice, a current record in the age of satellite observation–even as median projections of 4.54 million sq km lies below the 4.9 million sq km observed in 2022, slightly higher than projected late-summer forecast for the previous three years. The margins of ice calculation, find fragile summer conditions for the ice sheet’s thickness, and different forecasts of the “ice-free” date when arctic ice drops below a threshold of thickness, just a sixth, or 15%.
Sea -Ice Outlookt, June 2023 /Actic Consortium of the United States
–but quite scarily low initial conditions for sea-ice thickness across models (RASM; AWI; GFDL).
The observation of arctic ice may be a way to register global warming hat tarrived just in time, but one realized that it might be too late. Fort eh technology of remote observation of ice thickness reveals a terrifying amount of of Antarctica’s coast fringed by floating ice shelves and sea ice, as we monitor the calving off of icebergs with increased from an ever-deteriorating sheet of arctic ice. There might be nothing better to focus on as we start a new season of summer, when leting rates stand to rise. The appearance and proliferation of the slippery surfaces of “ice tongues” on coastal glaciers sound alarms of the growing dangers of global warming we demand greater artfulness to map. The seasonal ice tongues form from meltwater at the base of glaciers, extending out to the sea in winter months as seawater freezes at their base, as links of glaciers to ocean register of the loss of glacial mass; the margins of glaciers will break either into icebergs or floating sea-ice sheets.
Ice Tongue off of Erebus Glacier at Ross Island, Antarctica
Reflections on ice breatking–and ice melting–suggests a mapping less rooted in data points. Melt rates remain less visible or mappable by points, their seasonal melting registers a dramatic loss of glacial mass, ice flow, and ice sheet loss we are only starting to map or comprehend. The difficulty of getting ones mind around the dimensions of arctic warming and glacial melting, moving across land-sea divides and boundaries, not compellingly rendered by the point-based syntax of most global projections, demands a relation of map to viewer, and modeling to mapping, able to bridge land and sea by melting rates. Polar Portal has tracked the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet by over 255 cubic km annually, increasing the warming of arctic waters to add about a millemeter of sea-level each year, 2003-16, the ocean interface of glaciers may be an increasing focus to discriminate the contributions of surface melting, iceberg melting, and iceberg calving to global sea-level rise.
Have we neglected to pay attention to the changes in the polar landscape, not only available through remote sensing, and the impending and projected prospect of the disappearance of alpine glaciers by the century’s end? The danger of creating future landslides, and global ecosystemic eruptions and disturbances triggered by the rising of ocean waters across the globe, as the nearly nine millions square miles in the northern hemisphere alone stand to thaw–about 15%, triggering massive instability in a large region of continuous permafrost that we have not yet come to terms even as it threatens to destabilize the continuity of our very notions of the nation-state.
The recent loss of ice sheets and mountainous glaciers in the past decade have paralleled the loss of the arctic ice sheet. The largest tidewater glacier of the northern hemisphere is already losing considerable ground to water, as rising ocean temperatures have led it to shed more water into the arctic seas. We are poised at a moment of arctic melting so intense that calls for a more “empathic cartography” Glacial loss has contributed to almost a fifth of sea-level rise, and the thinning of glaciers that lie just off of the ice sheet of arctic peripheries have accelerated two-fold over the last two decades, as the acceleration of ice loss on the edges of ice sheets of Greenland or Antarctica have accelerated far beyond the Greenland or the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets.
If icebergs had trapped the Grinell expedition in the mid-nineteenth century off Greenland, much as the density of fish trapped the first sailors making landfall at Newfoundland, retreat of icebergs is mapped as opening the arctic seas to new routes of commercial travel. But there are many darker sides of glacial retreat that provide clues and hints about the crumbling of ice-shelves in an age of ocean warming. If this blog discussed ways earth observation affords multiple compelling ways of visualizing the Anthropocene–from the increase of global brightening to environmental pollution and degradation, to the effects of river discharge of fertilizer entering the coastal ocean as challenges of remote observation, we face the danger of flattening the global ecological impact of these changes. For the degrading of both polar ice and land-based glaciers transcend efforts of environmental monitoring, and open questions of the stakes of mapping and coming to terms with glacial loss.
6. For are not maps untapped ways for coming to terms with the potentially devastating cascading processes of anthropogenic change? To map may not mean an ability to reverse-engineer, but offer tools to grasp the extent and increased contingencies of global change, especially by illuminating what are the edges or critical boundaries of climate changes that escape a purely meteorological register or dire predictions of yet another apocalyptic Jeremiad.
We track the deteriorating ice sheet of polar regions, mapping icebergs remotely by satellite as they appear, designating each as they calve into smaller bergs, naming each by the antarctic quadrant they were first sighted, and suffixes identifying icebergs calved from bergs already separated from the ice sheet; May 13, 2023 saw the calving off of A-76A, A-76E, A-76F, A-76-G, A-76H, A-76I, making the Weddell Sea an icy alphabet soup where smaller icebergs multiplied til they became too small to observe. It is tempting to create a time-stop tracking of the fragmenting icebergs of arctic regions, if the scale of icebergs would be impossible to allow them all to be discerned–but the shape of these calved fragments are perhaps poorly mapped as shape files, as their shedding of meltwater into the surrounding oceans will have cascading effects in ocean circulation, sinking less and less cold water into the deep ocean, and the overturning that increases the upwellings and ocean currents that help to provide offers food and needed nutrients to the global oceans at surface level. Rather than being focussed only on the arctic, such a fully three-dimensional map would have to encompass the rates of ice-melt, and the effects of the water shed from calved icebergs in the ocean’s biosphere.
Rather than streams of ice that created vast rivers that took Wordsworth’s breath away, unveiling Mt. Blanc’s “streams of ice” and “array of of might waves” coursing in the Vale of Chamonix, that obliterated all living thoughts, or the serenity that Shelley found in the mountain–gleaming on high, “still snowy, and serene,” in”frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,/blue as the overhanging heaven”–the icemelt entering the global oceans are a tragedy of the accelerated shedding of water that cannot be seen or clearly tracked.
For the greatest difficulty is not only to integrate remote satellite observations beneath cloud cover into stacked map tiles seamlessly, but to imagine the comprehend the cascading impact of shedding water on habitat, and as a form of ecosystem change, as the edges of these polygons contract.
Remote satellite observation allows real-time tracking of iceberg deterioration, compiling an increasingly important form of environmental intelligence, trying better to understand the nature of wave-ice interactions as temperatures rise, with an eye wide open to “downstream” marine conditions, as an increased amounts of icemelt enters global oceans with major consequences for habitat, environmental niches, and water temperatures as well as sea-level rise. Coastal boundaries of the Antarctic ice shelf are constantly shifting, as fragmentation of glaciers needs to be constantly updated, as we try to come to terms with the lack of clear edges of arctic seas and the increasing meltwater that is entering them. If Mt. Blanc famously offered Romantics a landmark of a glacial sublime–“still, snowy and serene” were its “unearthly forms” of ice and rock–melting icebergs suggest the inverse of “frozen floods, . . ./Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread/And wind among the accumulated steeps,” a hollowing out of the majestic views of the past. The effects of multiplying sea ice fragments, and the less easily registered addition of streams icemelt downstream are far more sobering than solemn or serene and, scarily, still not well understood.
The phenomenon of glacial thinning at the edges of ice sheets affirms the importance of mapping the risk that will be faced by a full two-thirds of global land-based glaciers by the start of the next century, in the most optimistic projections increasing sea-level by perhaps 3.5 to 6.5 inches, and displacing ten million globally, and shrinking global water supplies on which much of the world depends from mountain glaciers. Already, glacial melt has contributes a third of sea-level rise. As glaciers are disappearing in the Alps and Norway, glacial mass loss suggests one of the most compelling reasons for the need for pledges to reduce climate change, however unlikely to occur, and place a on the mapping of glaical mass of the 200,000 land based glaciers on which we need far better datapoints. The fragmentation of the edges of the Greenland’s ice shelf are an illustration of the astounding geographic retreat of some 85% of global glaciers worldwide between 2000 and 2020, a direct response to anthropogenic change–a loss of frozen water whose effects or extent we cannot fathom.
The relation of glaciers to surrounding sea and ice-temperatures create different rates of melting, rates of glacial flow, and thickness, that the open-source engine, Open Global Glacial Model (OGGM) tries to offer long-term modeling of glacial melt less tied to mass. OGGM has since 2020 tried to offer a long-term tools to model glacial melt by a glacier-sensitive model sensitive to local specificity of glaciers–flow-lines, melting rates, directionality, to model parameters of glaciers across the world using observation-based area-elevation, parametrizing width and thickness changes over time, and in relation to sea-water and air temperatures, to grasp the huge losses in glacial footprints in sq km., using the flow lines and directionality of glacial melt to calibrate losses specific to their situation and location, and to the surrounding environment, but also separated by ice-divides in a clearer inventory of glaciers that allow a clearer picture of glacier flow.
7. The departure of glacial ice from the global landscape is due to warming air and warmer water that washes the edge of the glacier, eroding edges of the ice shelf. The glaciers present in totality terrifying new landscape of impermanence, whose edges seem to shrink before our eyes. While much of the glacial mass of Greenland is indeed not visible to the eye–oceanfront glaciers lie largely below sea-level, bathed by waters from a frigid Arctic Sea, glacial mass below 600 feet seems to be breaking from the ice sheet in ways visible from satellite imagery.
But they fail to reveal the increasing vulnerability of deep glaciers lying underwater to ice melt–
–evident in the retreat of coastal glaciers whose inland retreat of oceanfront glaciers seems to have resulted from resting on melting foundations deeply vulnerable to warming ocean currents.
–in ways that are echoed by the scale of the loss of glacial ice on the edges of the Antarctic ice sheet. The crumbling of the Antarctic ice sheet’s edges offers dramatic evidence of the accelerated ocean warming that bears the brunt of global warming–Antarctica is shedding some 150 gigatons of ice annually between 2002-2020, on average, as Americans fought over the Paris Accords and human-induced Global Warming.
The glacial melting has created sea-level rise at a rate of almost a half a millimeter a year, per NASA climatologists tracking the terrifying scale of glacial losses in the Antarctic Ice Mass, a loss that is particularly pronounced on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. And if this map is dated, the recent shifts of global sea-surface temperatures, recently hitting a new high, presented the greatest anomaly yet on record to the Berkeley Earth Institute, a sudden spiking of the temperatures as sea surface temperatures off of South America some five degrees above the 1971-2000 average and nearly fourteen degrees off the North America’s Atlantic coast, shifting land temperatures: but the rapidly melting sheets of Antarctic ice to meltwater may slow the circulation of global oceans that long regulated global temperatures, soaking up excess heat, in ways that stand to reduce the oceans’ contribution to lowering global temperatures in an age threatened by catastrophic changes created by increased heating.
The record-low levels of ice in the Antarctic sea stand to change global oceans in terrifying ways, creating less hospitable oceans that risk how the ocean remains a habitat. In returning lower quantities of cold, oxygenated water to the deep ocean, the melting of coastal waters of Antarctica stands to slow down the sinking of water to the ocean floor that triggers an “overturning” circulation that sends more nutrients upwelling to oceans’ surface. The lowered circulation stands to allow more heat to increase the ice loss of West Antarctica even more, and increased thinning of Antarctica’s ice shelf far beyond the calving of icebergs for the last decade, as a slightly earlier study by E Rignot revealed pockets of glacial melt rates that exceed the rates of glacial calving (shown in red), suggesting the danger of disruption in stability across the ice sheet’s increasingly delicate edges with effects that cascade far beyond the poles or polar setting.
Mapping Ice-Shelf Melting v. Glacial Calving in Antarctica/E. Rignot et al (2013)
The dramatic loss of glacial ice has sharply accelerated through the election of a candidate who rejected human-caused climate change as a scam devised to increase government regulations. Rather than evidence of a rigged theory, the losses of ice mass suggest the Antarctic and the Arctic seas are so easily compartmentalized and hidden from view that we could become so purblind to the effects of climate change on global oceans? Far better to travel north to chase icebergs at still higher latitudes, in hopes of glimpsing the remaining if far reduced fragmentary bergs that float almost elegiacally off Greenland’s coast and they can still be seen.
Global Warming Leaves Reduced Icebergs Floating off of Kulusuk, Greenland in 2019/Felipe Dana/AP
Is it any surprise that at this rate of loss to the ocean, the viewing of glacial loss suggests a calculus we are not able to really fully grasp from remote sensing alone? Few remotely sensed maps can capture either the underwater glacier, o thick slab of the ice-shelf as its edges are “calving” and breaking into the sea as its underside melts. The massive shelves of Greenland and Antarctica are both quite thick–up to 10,000 feet thick in some places, and even up to 15,000 feet in others–but the calving of ice on their edges before warm air or water can be due to meltwater running down the glacier to bore holes in the ice sheet, and the melting of the sub-ocean shelf, reflecting a loss of mass on the oceanfront glaciers’ edges. The Kane Basin is still a site for viewing the Humboldt Glacier, the largest in the nothern hemisphere, i tabular icebergs that calved off it in Kane Basin are far less majestic ice formations than Kane once saw,–or the 110 km front of Humboldt Glacier itself.
© Nick Cobbing / Greenpeace
© Nick Cobbing / Greenpeace
Elisha Kent Kane, Frontispiece to Arctic Explorations
8. Romanticism spanned a broad geographic revaluation of the “wild,” extending from Mt. Blanc to what Thoreau called Mt. Ktahdn to new northern latitudes, in some eagerness to find arctic mirrors of Mont Blanc. The travels to the North Pole that explorers like Walton, the fictional narrator of Frankenstein, or indeed the actual arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane, sought landscapes of enduring emotion, in the liminal space of an arctic world. The romantics fascination with visiting glaciers in the Arctic Sea led to a romance of glacial calving off Greenland’s coast as an opportunity to look back through time at the geological formations of glacial drift during the mid-nineteenth century, or as one move into the primeval timeless landscapes of the abundantly glaciated open ocean sea–Kane’s drawings and watercolors were models for an upwelling up of images of the splendor of arctic isolation and magnificinece.
Passage through the Ice, June 16 1818, Lat. 70 44 North
James Hamilton, Watercolor of Arctic Scene After E. Kent Kane, 1856 © The Trustees of the British Museum
Over a century ago, spectacular panoramas of virtual polar tourism presented a major venue for popular fascination in print culture, as explorers of arctic waters presented a polar sublime, of a monumentality akin to visions of Mont Blanc described by the romantic poets, popularizing haunting images of “towering icebergs, approaching each other like promontories . . . with cavernous recesses.” The rhetorical power of reading first-hand accounts of the calving of icebergs in early polar exploration provided a model for marveling at how the breaking off of icebergs from the “ice-locked coast” of Greenland indeed revealed the ability to witness at first-hand the “genesis of icebergs on the face of the globe,” migrating the frozen north to ever higher latitudes, to make manifest or map a center of global fascination for an era of globalism long before globalization.
The ocean travel of the bergs from Greenland’s coast led to a fascination with the parthenogenesis of ice, “calving” off icebergs that travelled the world as icy sentinels. Today, we witness the increased calving of large glacial masses from Antarctica drift into the ocean north, regions the size of Manhattan, Delaware, and Georgia, but have trouble mapping how 4,000 square miles of ice floats out to sea. Cultivating any similarly ecstatic relation to the frozen ice has its counterpart, perhaps, in the modern elegiac echo that is difficult to process, but is transformed, mutatis mutandis, from the sublime to its own, new form of trauma that we can’t come to terms with, far less suggestive of genesis than of apocalypse–and we don’t want to go there yet.
Antarctic Iceberg A688A Floats Out to Sea
As Kent Kane’s senesational explorations of the arctic sea from his safe harbor on the shore of Walden Pond, natural scientist Henry David Thoreau may have taken them as a basis to integrate Walden in a global geography of his own. Thoreau would profess little interest in the Philadelphia physician’s description of these “gigantic monsters” of icebergs calving into the frozen “mysterious sea” off Greenland’s ice-locked coast; if the polar explorations of Grinell had been widely celebrated, Thoreau was committed to a disciplined discovery of transcendence in the local: “Does Mr. Grinell know where he himself is?” he asked readers of Walden, a bit flippantly; “Be rather the . . . Lewis and Clark and Frobisher of your own streams and oceans.” He brought global explorations to Walden, admiring how the landscape he lived as sculpted by the retreat of glaciers, creating deep kettles like Walden Pond. (He may also have harbored considerable jealously about the animals, birds, and plants Kane brought back to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, including a narwhale tusk of considerable fascination that held a prime spot in the Academy’s museum.)
These objects were surrogates for a sensational narrative of travel, creating the image of visiting icebergs in the treacherous frozen waters afforded something like a new global sublime–
Elisha Kent Kane, Arctic Explorations (1856)
–able to be replicated in the sublime Thoreau found at Walden Pond’s pure waters, in the wilds just outside of Concord, with no need to travel beyond the very same longitude and latitude he lived to experience the very sense of primeval grandeur that the plates engraved for Kane’s travel narrative provided audiences of American readers only several years later.
The comparison of Kane’s Arctic Explorations and his own attention to the freezing, melting, and thawing of Walden Pond and the landscape adjoining was not only metaphorical in its evocation of a poetic sublime that both Kane and Thoreau channeled in literary as much as geographic terms. Thoreau intuited Walden as a glacial lake in his Journals, left by an arctic edge across Sudbury plain, “as if the snow and ice of the arctic world, traveling like a glacier, had crept down southward and overwhelmed and buried New England” (March 1852) burying glacial ice in its wake. Thoreau paled before the wonderful purity of Walden Pond’s blue transparent waters “as if the water were just poured into it basin and simply stood so high” (April, 1852) to create an inland sea that offered him safe harbor. Casting Walden Pond as an inland sea one-upped narratives of arctic adventure, as Kane’s own later account; Thoreau imagined “towering icebergs . . . with cavernous recess” in the winter landscape of New England, rather than out at sea. Perhaps reacting to deep snows of 1852, as Thorston has argued, Thoreau clearly conjured an ancient arctic landscape around Walden. But he mediated the purity of the arctic sublime in conjuring a painted image of Winter in which “the icebergs should gradually approach,” echoing the sublime of Massachusetts’ winter landscape.
Thoreau aestheticized glacial loss as leaving a train of pure lakes, as if speculating that the very same local landscape he marveled at appeared shaped by glacial drift–and mapping the very glacial iceberg into the Massachusetts landscape he had mapped. There is something like a literary glacial drift that he took delight in, contrasting to the vision of Mont Blanc, in what he called “his lake country,” and to which he contrasted the sublime of Patagonia. By March 1852, he seems to have placed Walden in a paleo-valley of a lost north-flowing Sudbury River that once ran over the region of lake, and the shoreline of a glacial lake of the Sudbury Plain. Without calling Walden the result of glacial icemelt left to explain the unique transparent purity of its waters, it was a spectacle as worthy of attentive study as the arctic wilds of the icebergs Kane described, as if the “mimic sea” of the ponds waters had the very same purity Kane would have witnessed off Greenland’s coast. While it is hard to note that we now see the disappearance of global ice and arctic warming as a final consequence of the commercial globalization of trade, or that we see the impending disappearance of global ice as a final consequence of industrialization, the awe of glacial observation began as a part of a global narrative. And of visualizing a historical scope able to transcend place.
Rather than being content to remain on the surface of the water, as most, concerned only with the commercial affirms or circumstances “transient and fleeting,” what he had likened in the Journals to “driftwood on the flood,” Thoreau felt the emergent science of glaciology offered the terra firma in the unique depth of the lake he sought, which made him “desirous recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond” and discover its banks were at so steep an angle, cutting holes for sounding its depth and that of its banks, and to “push past the sludge of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe . . . till we come to a hard bottom with rocks in place, which we can call reality” as a point d’appui–a baseline, for geographers as Humboldt, a standard for comparison. Thoreau traced the motion glaciers as a literary topos by what he read in the landscape, without explicitly calling the waters of Walden glaciers deposits of actual arctic purity, on claiming arctic origins for the Sudbury plain–similarly to how in painted panorama of arctic seas displayed in New Bedford charting the global industry of whaling map the migration of glaciers in what was the single largest painted surfaces in America from 1848, icebergs provided scenery of global coverage opened by global transit of whale oil and blubber to global markets for whale blubber and spermaceti: Thoreau wrote before Kane described the expedition in print, but might well have asked Americans caustically why travel all the way to Greenland to view icebergs, if their effects were present in one’s own back yard outside Concord, Massachusetts.
from Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World, Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington (1848)
Kane had become an American hero as a polar explorer in antebellum America, whose bestseller had securely placed the surgeon within the nation’s literary and scientific elite, and led him to be mourned as an “intrepid Arctic navigator” not long after he toured cities with the first-hand sketches he made of the “sublime yet awful grandeur” of arctic travel in Boston, in 1857, as he traveled to regain strength in the Caribbean. His witnessing of the primal, if not timeless and monumental, landscape of glacial grandeur, seen as an American Humboldt in the public processions, reflecting the travel narratives that were stylized as objects of wonder: newspaper accounts of the arctic that he wrote soon after joining an Arctic expedition in 1850 won wide readership as they were verbal panorama in themselves on the rings of pack ice that had trapped previous explorers of the “Open Polar Sea” that became his destination.
Circumpolar Chart illultrating Kane’s Paper or Access to an Open Polar Sea/American Geographical Society New York, 1853
Kane’s immensely popular writing was a point of comparison and a standard of literary description, as much as geographic certainty, which he assiduously promoted in newspapers from 1850 as expanding the bounds of rational inquiry and science. Kane’s heroism as an observer of ice quite triumphantly mediated northern regions to a reading audience–engaging ion the fighting of walrus or polar bear to offering exact Humboldtian observations of a frozen world. Writing in his Journal in the snows of 1852, Thoreau conjured a sense of the monumentality he found in Walden, asking himself in his Journals, “Who can believe that this is a habitable part of the globe?” describing the scene as “as dreary as the shores of the Frozen Ocean,” aven Pond was whose “scenery is wholly Arctic.” As if moving the arctic landscape into his own walking grounds outside Concord, Massachusetts, he described Fair Haven Pond as akin to Baffin’s Bay, transposing the arctic to New England, describing how, on Feb 3, 1852, “It looks as if the snow and ice of the arctic world, traveling like a glacier, had crept down southward and overwhelmed and buried New England,” and imagining a traveler before two immense icebergs in Massachusetts, as if climates might overlap, the landscape so “covered with snow” and “encased in snowy armor two feet thick” one can hardly “believe that this is the habitable globe.” Walden might be well understood as a site for making similarly valuable scientific observations, and an alternative archetype of virtuous science to the arctic explorer.
Although glaciology as understood by Agassiz was not embraced as a critical tool by Thoreau, the spectacle of nature of the Arctic seems to approach or overlap with Walden, and Massachusetts geography, poetic claims that suggest a literary aesthetic able to trump geography and chart the migration of glaciers as foci of intellectual engagement. Sir Francis Head, the Governor of Upper Canada wrote popular studies of the North American landscape, that credited the “interminable forest, through the boughs and branches of which the snow falls,” as protecting its increased accumulation, even if each backwoodsman who clears trees unbeknownst to his self-interested actions “softens and ameliorates the climate of the vast continent around him.”
While Thoreau appreciated the monumentality of the frozen landscape of Walden, he doubted extensive American forests preserved snowfall or hindered the melting of snow by the sun and wind, reasoning forests were not in fact better grounds for the snow’s accumulation than plains, but if Head described creation of cold mists from the ground offered the very same chill “caused by the vicinity of a floating iceberg” (1846), Thoreau was aesthetically agreeable to situate the spectacle of arctic icebergs in Massachusetts, imagining it as a similarly primeval landscape of monumental frozen antiquity, and hardly part of “the habitable globe”by imagining his winter walks as a solitary traveller wrapping his cloak about him against a driving storm in a narrow pass between two “icebergs with cavernous recesses” akin to “towering icebergs approaching each other like promontories” that mirror Kane’s arctic expedition after his ship was stranded his ship in glacial ice, escaping by an overland journey of eight-three days and returning in New York in 1855.
Ice Berge Near Kocoax, Life Boat Cove, from a Drawing by Kane (1854)
Kane’s sublime accounts of the sublime of icebergs calving off the coast were imagined by Thoreau as he stood at its rocky shore of the kettle of Walden Pond, as if on the they were the residue of the glacial migrations of an earlier age and at the shore of Walden Pond he stood at the edge of time, in a position as sublime as Kent Kane encountered, an American version of the “dumb cataracts and streams of ice” of the wondrous Vale that reconciled Wordsworth to reality on Mont Blanc, whose own Mere de Grace glacier has shrunk considerably at a rate of over forty meters per year, its permafrost evaporating to allow increasing rockfalls. Kane described and showed drawings of the arctic spectacles seen in the Grinell Expedition’s voyage to the American Geographical and Statistical Society in December 1852, offering a compelling if vicarious an account of confronting pack ice, icebergs, and glaciers for readers while he was still in the arctic, describing how he had fastened his ship to “old floes” fifty yards in diameter, surf breaking over his head. The story of planting ice-anchors in icebergs as he crossed the arctic ice-belt to search for remains of John Franklin’s 1845 expedition, Arctic Explorations, was a compelling bestseller about the polar regions.
Fastened to an Iceberg, from Elisha Kent Kane, Arctic Explorations (1856)
The encounter with such glacial monuments had been featured in Grand Panorama of whaling voyages from 1848, offering audiences a scrolling spectacle of the dangers of being trapped in arctic ice and evoke dangers of sinking beside the majestic sentinels marking entrance to polar regions. (The very landscape set the stage for Mary Shelley’s gothic novel of a boundary-crossing scientist who chances the “secrets of creation” whose path through the “fortress of nature” concludes as he is observed the polar explorer who searches for a Northwest Passage above the Arctic Circle, whose ship is trapped in the advancing polar sea-ice in the Nordic Seas: only when immobilized by ice is he struck by the misshapen giant monster who seems embody Walton’s desire to cross boundaries; he is drawn to the arctic landscape, finding it “in vain to be persuaded the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.” As his arctic voyage skirted the edge of advancing polar ice around the Novaya Zemla archipelago, as if to approach the North Pole, Walton crossed paths with the boundary-crossing Victor Frankenstein, moving northwards amidst arctic ice floes. Walton had “accompanied whale-fishers on several occasions to the North Sea,” but as he is shut in by sea ice, he spies another boundary-crosser on one of the “large, loose masses which float about”–not “a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but a European,” a bedraggled doctor who he could “not allow . . . to perish at sea.”)
Grand Panomara of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World (1848)
Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World (1848); unschooled at New Bedford Museum
These painted screens provided a precursor of the disaster films of the late twentieth century, in which survival is pitted against unnavigable glacial obstructions. The Monster, when quitting Frankenstein, if having felt the “cheering warmth of summer” and recalling the sensation of the wind against his cheeks, having lot his tie to his creator seems determined to “seek the northernmost extremity of the globe” on the ice-rafts on which h travelled as his creator sailed into the Arctic Ocean, as it offered a way to escape sensation from spiritual agonies by which he was consumed. The Monster indeed moves toward the North Pole’s ice cap to numb himself to the well of unsatisfied feelings by which he is agonizingly consumed, his flight northward on drifting floes that seem to mirror the shards of the tragedy life an overly fatigued Victor Frankenstein stains to try to make cohere, past scientific and medical aspirations splintered, as the creation solemnly proclaims that the “burning miseries” that accompanied his crimes and misfortunes by which he is afflicted might no longer be felt, his corpse’s ashes to be consumed by the arctic seas.
If Romantics experienced icebergs’ immensity as the sublime discovery of a new world. Today, the awe of confronting the timelessness of giant icebergs remains incommensurate with fears of confronting glacial melting and recession of glacial ice. The very magnitude of problems are far greater as we face a logical bottleneck of grasping the immensity of glacial loss maps seem unable to remediate: but climate denialism is so widespread that it has support from columnists who might know better, like George Will, have platforms to ask in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post for fatalistic denial: global heating might not be that much of a bad thing, Will argued, as even if man-made climate change were actually “real,” the inability of humans to do anything about it is all but certain–a logic of climate denial of hard-baked skepticism climate change is caused by humans reflects the alternative universes the American Enterprise Institute or Cato Institute underwrite, more than consensus, as if federal regulation of carbon emissions is overly costly and un-American to boot.
9. There is no ability to even grasp the horror of the Monster, as we become numb to the very phenomenon by placing it at a distance from human activity or responsibility. The demand to refine “speculative cartography” of climate change that might orient us to a new way of being in the world being redefined by global warming, as much as the levels of surging seas. We might attempt to understanding the mapping of crumbling glaciers and arctic melting as consequence of anthropogenic climate change and global warming, as much as data points, behind imposing a light blue layer on the prospective flooding of inhabited lands submerged by rising seas. This might be an atlas of impending loss, as Judith Schalansky’s powerful atlas, “Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will,” as she has subtitled her Atlas of Remote Islands (2009). Schalansky, as a new Petermans, offered readers entrances to worlds often isolated in a globalized world, as if they are indeed alternate worlds and a counter-story of the Anthropocene and alternative story of discovery.
But if sea-level rise might be tracked by habitat loss–as global warming–that increased the vulnerability of multiple charismatic megafauna, from polar bears to puffins or black Guillemots.
World Wildlife Fund
But processing the melting of ice-sheets and the shedding of billions of tons of surface melting and ice chunks of calving icebergs as climate change advances and melt rates accelerate far beyond the expected for ten years poses conceptual problems of a different order. The relative urgency of abundant maps modeling sea-level rise is perhaps dismissed as speculative by denialists but has sought to stimulate climate crisis conversation about climate change akin to satellite imagery, over the past decade, including slider bars to simulate sea level rise–yet for all the cartographic daring, the increased vulnerabilities to species of ice-free oceans remain hard to map or to conceive.
World Wildlife Fund
What is a polar Dasein? While it is striking that we have been tracking the deterioration of the ice shelf of Greenland and the polar regions from 1978, glacial melting has a far less prominent place in our literary or geospatial consciousness, if it is not submerged in a state of outright denial. Mapping by the Danish Polar Portal reveals the balance sheet between snowfall and runoff of of the mass of ice sheet across Greenland Ice Sheet, uses as its baseline reference periods of 1981-2010, charting the melting of glacial tongues as it grows in greater contact with warmer arctic waters, dramatically reducing habitat and long frozen lands as the ice sheet of Greenland continues to fragment and contract each melting season, regularly degrading any gains of the previous winter–as temperatures at Greenland’s Summit Station have risen above freezing since 2019.
Karolin Eichier (June, 2022)
The rapid acceleration of a loss of mass reveals the deterioration or fragmentation of formerly continuous ice sheets as much as the decline of sea ice. The radical ecosystemic changes cannot be fully captured, even in consideration of the twenty-six successive years of diminishing of the arctic Ice Sheet’s surface mass balance hints at a fast-approaching tipping point: in recents summers, the balance has fallen far below earlier years and the onset of the melting season is ever earlier each year. The sea ice first measured by satellite in 1978 has declined to some of the very lowest levels since polar monitoring began; as ever greater stretches of ocean water absorb solar heat, warming the arctic waters, lower levels of sea ice on the polar periphery are accelerating glacial retreat.
While the denial of climate change is far more often politically motivated and apt to share financial backing from special interest groups in favor of unregulating fossil fuel usage is concealed in the alleged disinterest of many climate change skeptics, funding political action groups in a partisan climate where the warming of the climate maps onto attitudes to gun control, religious freedom, same-sex marriage, or gender reassignment, rather than objective grounds. When George W. Bush was recommended by political operatives he swap out the term “global warming” for the less threatening imprecision of the innocuously muted “climate change” to reduce “feelings of negative affect” back in 2002, scientists have been steadily recast as undue alarmists.
The masking of alarm created a recent shock to the scientific community, which but thirty years ago–in 1994–even those fearing planetary warming reserved judgement on the catastrophic possibility of polar melting, arguing prudently in the premier journal Science that if “warming would be expected to cause a reduction in the area covered by Arctic sea ice,” the scientific community “has yet to find unambiguous indications of an overall warming trend in the polar regions.” Only by 2013 did the prestigious journal acknowledge scientific consensus that it “has become increasingly clear that melting by a warming ocean may also be important” in the melting of the Antarctic ice shelf–where a significantly larger loss of ice than calving came form meltwater issuing from the small, warm-cavity Southeast Pacific ice shelves.
The pivot to identifying warming waters as contributing to polar melting was a bit of a recent seismic shift, as coastal landslides were increasingly triggered by glacial retreat. Were many over-stubbornly convinced were many of the frozen permanence of the polar regions’ ice sheets, as if the melting of the isolated drifts of the arctic barrens was just inconceivable? Despite a clustering of the ten warmest years of the previous one hundred and forty put four of in the 1990s, and the three hottest in the last five years, the ice floes of the arctic were seen as barren of life, and unimaginable to actually melt. There seemed something oddly specific in polar denialism, calling variations in sea-ice cover as due to “climate variability,” even as sea ice was shrinking in ways detected from 1978 and through the 1980s, greatly accelerating from 1987-94.
It was as if the arctic barrens, this area where Dr. Frankenstein pursued the monster he had created across drifts of frozen expanse, which Shelley imagined as she was watching the Mere de Glace on Mt. Blanc, was understood as timeless and permanently frozen, and was a surrogate for the “vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end” in which Victor Frankenstein chased the fleeing Monster he made. Yet if Mt. Blanc’s Mer de Grace is itself no longer frozen: by June, 2023, the growing seasonal decline of sea ice concentration in the arctic was striking and had definitely raised many eyebrows, and extended around the entire circumpolar ice shelf, with Antarctic sea ice concentrations at record lows in the satellite era.
Seasonal Reductions in Sea Ice and the Median Ice Edge, based on regularly updated observations, June 2023/ National Snow and Ice Data Center
10. Skepticism has been nourished by denialism and the merchants of doubt, and the calling into question of “modeling” as theories and propositions as if removed from environmental actuality. As climate science has been advantageously recast as constraints imposed on commerce and business that were harmful to business and free trade, and climate “modeling” and the “patterning” of warning questioned as the creations of scientists, or experts with vested interests, whose claims merit only skeptical attention, given an unforseen boost to deceptive revisionism about what “patterning” means. Public advertisements discrediting findings of climate change experts have mis-represented scientific claims, made targets of angry attack.
That most climate scientists have dramatically under-estimated the scale and scope of patterns of global warming has, however, become increasingly evident in recent maps of the quite catastrophic scale of recent glacial retreat. The gradual disappearance of these once seemingly timeless immensities, that seemed outside of time, is hard to map as a melting of global consequence, even if their melting is of global consequence. We now calibrate or measure baselines of glacial loss in complexly engineered visualizations that try to measure and assess the scale of glacial loss, and perhaps the end of the arctic immensity whose sublime fascinated mid-nineteenth century naturalists like Thoreau. Alpine peaks afforded georeferenceable guides to georectify aerial photographs of the Alpine massif of Mont Blanc of 1917 at the very angle of aerial photographs taken by biplane by the Swiss aviator Walter Mittleholzer. The recent ability to compare the early spectacular black and white photographs of the massif’s spectacular northern side–comrpising the Bossons Glacier, Argentière Glacier, and Mere de Glace–with affording accurate powerful time-travel that apprises one of the extent of glacial retreat–reveals the recent melting of those very glaciers by which Mary Shelley was so inspired to occur at an amazing rate of over forty meters a year; Mer de Glace has lost up to eighty meters in its depth over the last twenty years, receding uphill by two kilometers in the past hundred years alone exposing increased rock. Geolocation and 3D tools afford potentially powerful visualization tools able to compel public awareness of ice melt in the Alps, if not anticipating the collapse of the glacier and its future disappearance far beyond the mountains’ southern slope, and the radical historical rupture glacial retreat portends–or has already come about.
Mt. Blanc’s North Face Glacier Loss over a Hundred Years/University of Dundee, 2019/phys.org
We might also track the footprint of the expanding hydrography along the glacier’s base that grows every summer at a greater rate. The rivulets and streams were mapped by flow by using the very blue that Thoreau waxed about as distinguishing Walden as “cerulean” perhaps to suggest its heavenly hues after the ancient Latin, that Romans regularly applied to the sky–a “matchless and indescribable light blue” so distinct among other lakes he declared its azure ice invaluable, even if it didn’t appeal on the market as well as the white ice of other local points. The brilliant meltwater shown in blue reveals the scale of hydrological changes of global melting less as a theory or model, than a record of reduced glacial mass, with rising temperatures, as glacial runoff is expected to increase with glacial retreat, but to drop off in summer periods as the snowpack dwindles, much as it has in California in recent years, as increasingly dramatic decreases in meltwater trigger cascading effects downstream-from hydropower systems to ecosystems to nuclear coolants, all of which are tied to the regular flow of meltwater from what was long believed a timeless resource. As the photographic contrast reveals the scale of glacial loss, increasing icemelt from its perimeter and surface suggests the reduced region of the glacier itself.
Hydrological Network and Glacier Mass in the Mont-Blanc Massif in an Era of Climate Change
If Kane’s sensational Arctic Explorations offered an idea of the sublime, Walden offered an alternative sublime in its purity. Inspired by contemporary geological debates, and Kane’s accounts of glacial calving, Thoreau arrived at quite provocative speculations on global glacial retreat, suggesting that the frozen forms where Kane placed the genesis of icebergs might be imagined as sculpting the New England landscape across which glaciers had retreated–dragging boulders and leaving glacial waters in the hills–that he might contemplate at Walden, in 1852, without leaving his cabin, even as Kane made his first-hand observations as a surgeon for the Grinnell Expeditions that had sailed up the coast of Greenland in 1850, on a rescue mission for the ships lost in 1843, against the backdrop of the spectacular role of icebergs in the slightly later 1848 panorama of global travel. We are learning to “see” the loss of glacial mass in our own web-based maps, trying to grasp by remote sensing the scale and magnitude of their loss, but still not appreciating the cascading consequences ofn habitat, food supply, and the delicate ecological niches of the arctic. Are we courting dangers of flattening our perceptions of glacial melt, and denying or suppressing global climate risks? In the absence of the sublime, we need to develop a global sense of the consequences of glacial melt.
The wonder at glacial size grew in the mid-nineteenth century under the influence of Lyell’s geographic theories, transmitted in no small part through Darwin’s account of Patagonian glaciers. Thoreau internalized the geological sublime glaciation exercised across the humanities through his enthusiastic reading of Darwin’s voyage to Patagonia, a voyage on which Darwin made sure he had a recent copy of Lyell’s Principles of Geography in preparation for his journaling on the HMS Beagle, in anticipation of collecting observations of the shifts in the geological formation that had defined the South American coast, and especially of Patagonia. He learned to “see” the geology of the region with Lyell’s eyes, to conduct his own experiment of recording coastal mountain ranges and volcanoes to understand the shifts of geological phenomena hidden underneath geological strata.
The sense of revealing an internal structure of the earth offered more than an epistemological solid ground on which to stand, but bearings–a point d’appui–to measure his own place in the world. Thoreau had never seen an actual glacier. But he would not be able to recognize the difference between a glacier and the effects of a past glaciation that created the kettle of Walden Pond, the sinkhole whose depths he seeks to “recover” in the final section of his book. He doubted the need to travel to Patagonia to immerse oneself in glaciology, increasingly organized geological observations in excited diary entries, looking to Massachusetts ponds for evidence of his own Lyellian paleo-valley, imagining the unique topography of “my lake country” by locating site of Walden in the landscape that glaciation sculpted in the Sudsbury plain. He grew convinced of a global geologic significance to its “chain” of lakes, rewroting the manuscript of Walden with “the mind of the geologist” in 1851, convinced “it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting” of the specificity of the pond’s extreme depth as he revised his manuscript for publication. (In revising Ponds 1852-4, he conjured the “primeval banks” of moraines left by glaciers that moved southward across Massachusetts–the Pond become a kettle pond formed by glacial retreat: he didn’t have any need to tell the difference between a glacier and the pond’s transparent waters.)
When we travel today to see icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland or Labrador, we may seek evidence or tracers of the lost blue of Walden’s waters, while possible, the last sites of purity of brilliant blue in a world where few (if any) freshwater ponds have the long-gone purity Thoreau found in Walden Pond–and indeed find traces of the purity in an arctic landscape before they disappear into the warming ocean waters and warming climate that offer stark evidence of our entry into the Anthropocene. Is not the blue glow of the reduced rump of an iceberg lying off of the coast of Labrador–able to be reached by canoe for careful study!–resonant with the azure purity of the wild of Walden Pond? Its purity is a similar site for cleansing of the soul, promising a departure from the crowded city in cleansing oneself by paddling across icemelt to icebergs.
Iceberg Viewing off of Newfoundland and Labrador
If icebergs are a form of romantic ecotourism, an attachment to the far-off frozen sites, at the same time as icebergs are retreating from the surface of the earth to “experience iceberg viewing” for themselves–presumably after flying to Labrador. If eastern Newfoundland was once the site of the the U.S. Navy called Iceberg Alley, few of the 10-15,000 icebergs that calve today off of western Greenland reach the low latitudes to which the iceberg that hit the Titanic surprisingly floated, five thousand miles sound of the Arctic Circle, far south of the Labrador Sea, after calving off a thinning ice tongue of Jakobshaven isbrae fjord in Greenland, to the low latitude of 41N. If the thinning of the Jakobshaven isbrae fjord calved the iceberg that sunk the Titanic in the Northern Atlantic, south of the Labrador Sea, few of the 10-15,000 icebergs that calve off western Greenland reach 41N latitude, and only northern Newfoundland is a rich site of iceberg viewing.
There is a rage for open-source iceberg viewing, and uploading photos, as a vicarious experience of the disappearing icebergs, if one can see them while one can. This is a melancholy remove of global warming, perhaps, but a way of vicariously preserving an attachment to the frozen masses that daily drift by the coasts–the numbers register crowd-sourced views of each glacial mass, as if capturing temporary moment of the sublime purity before their peaks disappear into the sea.
The tourist resource and crowd-sourced mapping aid IcebergFinder.com offers an ability to track nearly a hundred and fifty “bergs” that are floating past our shores each Spring, and we hope that they will continue to return. But the gist of the crowd-sourced web map is that that is not likely to be the case, and that one might hurry to glimpse them while one can–the ancillary Iceberg Map is an artifact of the Anthropocene, very unlike Kent’s famous and inspiring travelogue, and the photos it includes are urgent evidence that one must visit the reduced masses while one can; one seems to watch them melting into the warming Atlantic. There is a vicarious thrill of tracking the iceberg along the Newfoundland coast, to be sure, but also something valedictory about watching the reduced bergs float off of Greenland, before they become icemelt, and of the need to travel to ever more northern to be able to view larger icebergs today.
Global Warming Leaves Reduced Icebergs Floating off of Kulusuk, Greenland in 2019/Felipe Dana/AP
To be sure, the very fact that icebergs move and melt means the map is an artifact of contingency, and affirmation of the instability of the world in an age of anthropogenic change; as an advertisement for tourism to Newfoundland, there is a clear fear these reduced bergs are not around for long. The blue seas are not so azure as the waters of Walden; the hope, one fears, is that the viewer is able to drive out to the Newfoundland coast before bergs shrink more–as many daily do, with some glaciers gaining over 200 “views” eerily similar to the metrics of an age of social media. Are these concentrated points of reference the future of the blue humanities? Or is there not something of a hope for capturing of the humanities in tracking their blue, frozen mass?
Can one have any real thrill before the global loss of gigaton of glacial ice steadily melting into the oceans nationwide? The gigatons of glacial ice that is calving off the coasts of Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and northern Canada has been increasingly melting into the coastal ocean, even if we only may register it in the persistent rise in sea-level we have no clear sense of how to accommodate the scale of its loss along our shores. This prospect of travel that marries awe with mourning, that is elegiac, up in Northern Canada, where the shores of Greenland and the polar regions are steadily melting at enormous scale, a rate of loss mirrored only in the Southern Andes and Alaska, or the glacial ice off Iceland, the island whose name resulted from erroneous cartographic transcription.
11. The synoptic view of a global loss of was charted as we learned that the speed of melting had doubled in the previous two decades, lead Niko Kommenda to use profile plots to visualize the large loss of ice at individual transits on a truly global scale–almost a quarter of which melted off of glaciers in Alaska, where nearly seventy Gt of ice are lost annually. In recent years, or since 2019, the rate of glacial thinning across the coast of Greenland and Antarctica’s ice sheet had quite rapidly accelerated as well, and the deep printer’s red Kommenda used to indicate loss seemed indeed to be dripping off of the landmass, in ways that suggested the down-water effects and the specter of sea-level rise. The loss has no ability to be stopped or lessened, destining the world to face rising oceans and puts us in need of finding a way to better tabulate a record of glacial health.
Niko Kommenda (2021)/Guardian
Glacial loss means less freshwater at the end of summer, and more devastating fire season, as well, as the disappearance of glaciers will alter global temperatures. Indeed, if rates of glacial disappearance continue–or are allowed to continue–the loss of some 80-90% of glaciers by 2050 will suggest a change in not only coastal but landlocked habitat: river water depends on glaciers, which acts as a sort of coolant refrigerating global temperatures and settled land, whose loss we are little adapted to contemplate–as we are little able to contemplate the loss of ecosystems that will result.
We might seek to find better ways to register this loss. If doing so will not offer much consolation, the size of these losses of glaciers, the problem is something that Kommenda has thought about how to render. For perhaps the geographic specificity of these losses–often shown as sequestered in the northern reaches–is not the best means to imagine how radically unknown the loss of frozen ice in ninety of the best surveyed glaciers over the decades, using early surveys of glaciers from the mid-nineteenth century on and the powerful glacial database, Global Land Ice Measurements from Space, to try to comprehend our loss. The result is a deeply melancholy map that conveys a sense of loss, without needing geographic specificity. Is the map not a means of inviting us to try to come to term with the scale of loss, or to process its irrevocability among a collective map drawn to scale? By collating surveys of the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century against the reduction of glacial mass, one can perhaps get one’s head around the consequences of such an accelerated rate of loss: the outlines of the final image of a GIF covering at least forty years chart an immense loss of the ice reserves not available for cooling the world as it starts to heat up in outline form.
The reduction is barely a sign of how much frozen ice is about to be lost, if that impending loss clearly follows the scale of retraction of glacial mass one can survey in these blots. The reduction of frozen ice may seem to be a Rorschach test or doodles arrayed on the screen below–
Niko Kommenda, Glaciers Then and Now, 2021
–but add up in their totality to a sum of cooling presence that one can’t really get one’s head around, tracing the edges and eddies of all those streams of cement that are running into the ocean from what was once part of some of our most sensitive topography. These maps of the hemorrhaging of the planet are a simple mapping of “then” and “now” that raises questions of the immensity of change over a few decades, in which the ice that appeared not only to Shelley or Darwin but to the first pictures of aerial flight are visualized as evidence of a record of the cascading effects of global overheating.
The loss are, all in all, inescapable, and out of scale, but the poetic power is deeply elegiac, which, perhaps, is the best tone to adopt, if one that is also somewhat unscientific. From Glaciar Torre-Adela Grande in the Andes in 2016, on the upper left, to Beresnikovbreen, beside it, in the Arctic Ocean, up to 2008, to Straightaway Glacier in Alaska, bottom left, and Glaciar Frías y Grande, in the southern Andes, in the lower right, in 2016, or Gornergletscher, that pools in a reduced mass to its left, in the Swiss Alps in 2015, this web-map of of glacial loss, if only a single page of disappearing islands, has the strength of an atlas.
Totted up in totality, scale of the loss of melting ice is mapped as a departure from local topography at global scale, as the largest glaciers across the world set to retreat and continue to disappear, a daunting page one is condemned to scroll, trying to add up all that frozen ice as one imagines the changes in water flow of further years. The unknown question is what that landscape would look like without their mass.
Click here for the Interactive Map of Glacial Loss, 2021
The map may seem a polemic, but its relative silence is a way of overcoming the trauma of climate change. But the poetics of an absence of past glacial masses offer forms of grasping the scale of loss that we might recognize–those how have been there might–but also suggest the deep inter-relations to the local environment, in the figures that reach down mountains, feeding lakes and rivers of untold number, whose local context almost doesn’t need to be mapped. It is in this period that we have started to deny global warming, wanting to keep on driving our cars, flying globally, laughing at carbon offsets, with abandon, and starting to permit arctic lands, newly revealed below snow, to be permitted for further gas and oil extraction. And yet perhaps we do so because–or even if–the scale of glacial loss is something truly impossible to comprehend save by the departure of that rich azure blue. We have bracketed the consequences of making a warming world.
The retreat of glacial ice due to global warming uses as its earliest glacial surveys measurements taken at is at times mapped from the time that Thoreau wrote is mapped as a forcefully elegiac way. If the contrast above show reductions of at least forty years, they tell a powerful the story of the fate of glaciers from the start of the environmental movement. The contraction of glacial bodies mapped in such deep shades of blue inspires a rereading of Thoreau’s attention to the blue waters of Walden Pond. If Thoreau recognized the Pond to which he was long attracted since childhood as a site on which to purify his soul, its waters shaped of “so remarkable depth and purity” as a “distiller of celestial dews,” the kettle pond of glacial formation he called “God’s eye” was of greater purity and depth than the other ponds around Concord he walked, indeed “so remarkable for its depth and purity” to be “intermediate in its nature between land and sky,” or pure “sky water,” rounded, deepened, and clarified by God to become worthy of deep meditation as “the earth’s eye,” in which “the viewer beholds his own nature” as if traveling outside oneself.
Upsala Glacier, Southern Andes, 1870-2016
Thoreau famously only attempted to map Walden Pond when its surface was frozen, allowing him to cut holes in its icy surface the hundred and sixty for depth readings to create a bathymetric maps plotted in a survey against sighting posts and a level to determine lines of triangulation against magnetic north. The geodetic survey of a pond, not fenced or bound as private property but open to all, began from being “desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond” is, in many ways, the inverse of this mapping of glacial retreat: the accelerated loss of glacial ice it charts is not the reawakening of a site of abundant habitat, but raises pressing questions of the departure of icemelt to the ocean waters, a huge diminution of glacial mass that disrupts downstream ecosystems and shorelines.
The mapping of the retraction of lost glacial mass in light blue waters map, in Thoreauvian terms, not an eye that is open, but an eye that starting to close, in which we may soon no longer clearly see ourselves. For Thoreau, of course, the seasonal melting of Walden Pond that marked the arrival of early Spring was a confirmation of its reawakening, the return of the birdsong that again animated local habitat and that Thoreau imagined conspired to help to crack its “silvery sheen” as the “thousand tinkling rills and rivulets” of melting icewater as “veins are filled with the blood of winter” that is departing are “springing into existence . . . suddenly” about the banks of the pond. If that icemelt revealed to Thoreau the “vitals of the globe [by formal analogy to] the vitals of the animal body,” the loss of azure in the haunting outlines of glacial loss are less ecstatic than elegiac.
For the icemelt is irrecoverable, less a script of rebirth or seasonal thawing than suggestive of a deep melancholy of irrevocable loss. The intensity of the “flash and gleam” of the iceberg that Wordsworth found in Mont Blanc seems more than a bit diminished, if maybe because the arctic seascape “did change her images and forms/before us, fast as clouds are changed in heaven.” Wordsworth tried to process the intensity of his encounter despite the rapidity of a speedy and even military march, dropping from hill to vale and mounting from vale to hill, preserving “attendant gleams/Of soul-illumination” that the peaks of Mt. Blanc provided imagery to express.
We are finding less illuminating in the topography of glacial retreat. Few scientists are recording the freshwater caches as scale of the retreat of glaciers grow, and we’ve turned to celebrating the opening of arctic routes for commercial sailing and military patrol, as an extension of land-based military theaters of global dominance has heated up with polar melting and global warming.
Observation stations seem to have been closing around the retreating polar permafrost for decades, black dots denoting those terminated by 2017, as the northward retreat of glacial mass grows. Increasingly, the mapping of the pole turns to opening new shipping routes, controlling offshore waters, and increasingly a language of competitive territorial claims and counter-claims as the opening of Arctic waters resembles less a theater of transcendence than the site of a new Cold War. As ice thins across the northernmost latitudes, or glaciers retreat, the predicted expansion of shipping routes across the North Pole itself are predicted to grow immensely by 2040, as routes for cargo ships that have no need for breaking ice on their routes (shown below in green) are predicted to expand globally, changing our notion of the navigable seas, removing the obstacles for northeast passage, and reducing the ice sheet in much of the North Pole to just a meter or a half meter.
The new polar landscape has already become visible in recent years off of the shore of Greenland, and it looks terrifying already in 2019, glaciers contracting to noncontinuous pockets on land and icebergs to fragments floating in a warming ocean.
Global Warming Leaves Reduced Icebergs Floating off of Kulusuk, Greenland in 2019/Felipe Dana/AP
Are we in collective denial of arctic realities, or resigned to an inability to change disastrous climate effects? The “denial” of the expanding neoliberal dogma of economic growth not only facilitated the bracketing of climate change and ocean warming, promising forever faster and smoother surface of travel, and casting polar melting as opening new avenues of profitable global commerce. The collective denial of climate change that has been described by Sally Weintrobe as a casualty of liberal exceptionalism that since the 1980s drove globalization has encouraged a doctrine of obfuscation and entitlements, but contracted horizons of political and ecological hope. We have been urged to travel to increasingly northern latitudes to view icebergs at first hand, on Arctic cruises with the intrepid Sierra Club director Ben Jealous, assured that all environmental effects of travel are to be compensated by the dubious promise of carbon offsets. But we are beset by a familiarity with the inevitability of glacial disappearance, we are hardly able to add up the cumulative effects of their loss as we rush to glimpse the glaciers that remain.
Musings on Maps 
Encyclopedically and rhetorically terrifying. Have you seen the work of Julian Charriere? “Erratic” ?
This is quite on topic, and became a nice pivot to an early section in the post. Chilling sensory map indeed…