Covering Glaciers with Blankets to Hide Ice—and the Real Problem
As climate change threatens glaciers and ice, a movement to save glaciers is emerging around the world, led by conservationists, governments, organizations and communities.Many different approaches have been tried, including using insulation bwicker To prevent melting, create artificial glaciersand implement Glacier Protection Act. However, as these events become more popular, communities and researchers—including chapter In the new book, Ice Humanities – have begun to question the motivations, framing and effectiveness of these movements, leading to some skepticism about their help in fighting climate change.
This chapter highlights five key examples of the glacier rescue movement, three of which use geoengineering projects to reduce ice loss.In Switzerland, a group of residents attempted to Insulation blankets on the Rhone Glacier, is an important source of fresh water and tourism revenue for the country.European ski resorts have covered glaciers and snow with blankets and tarps and produced artificial snow with snow machine.Meanwhile, in Ladakh, India, engineers are building artificial glacier and seracs to supplement agricultural and drinking water supplies.
A white blanket covers the middle right of the Rhone Glacier in an attempt to slow the ice’s melt.Photo: Mark Carey
In two other examples from this chapter, communities and countries have adopted different strategies to save ice, working to ensure legal and political protection of their glaciers. In 2010, Argentine lawmakers passed the world’s first national Glacier Protection Act, prohibiting mining, industrial activities and other harmful activities near the country’s glaciers. In India, two glaciers have been awarded the “Legal personalityApproved by the Uttarakhand High Court in 2017, it allows citizens to sue on behalf of the injured glaciers.
These five examples of the glacier saving movement are the focus of a chapter in the recently published book, Ice HumanitiesMark Carey, an environmental historian at the University of Oregon and lead author of this chapter, has been studying glacier retreat and the social impacts of ice for more than two decades. After seeing the transformation of glaciers into climate markers and observing the increase in glacier-saving movements, often led by groups outside the affected communities, he began to wonder why some stakeholders put more emphasis on saving glaciers than others, with the aim of What, what’s the impact on the community and the larger climate movement.
The study progressed in the summer of 2019 when two undergraduate researchers — Jordan Barton, now a law student at UC Berkeley, and Sam Franzer, now a graduate student at George Washington University — started in kerry research laboratory. Their initial research on Greenland icebergs turned to the Glacier Rescue Movement when movements started popping up in their different fields of study.According to Barton, media coverage followed the same pattern: “a lament of doom and gloom over lost ice,” followed by “focus on new [glacier-saving] Innovations” are often led by outsiders. Missing, however, from these stories, she notes, is any focus on “the communities that actually live in these melting glaciers.”
With this gap in mind, researchers set out to examine different glacier rescue movements through an ice human lens—focusing on the glacier representations, stories, and values that drive policy, engineering, and management strategies, rather than just the strategies themselves. Carey said they took a closer look at the five key examples highlighted in this chapter, using an ice humanistic approach to understand “societal actors and entities empowered to address ice loss and climate change” as well as “invisible actors” impact on residents. “
The Gangotri Glacier in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, a traditional Hindu pilgrimage site, is disappearing due to climate change. It is one of the glaciers that received legal personality in 2017, along with Yamunotri Glacier. Image credit: Amit Rawat/Flickr
Through this study, the authors found that much of the coverage of these campaigns focused on the tactics and sponsors of the campaign, rather than the actual outcome—whether it actually reduced glacier loss. Reports also often fail to address the communities most affected by the melting ice, focusing more on industrial impacts and tourism. As the authors observe in this chapter, “the act of providing a solution to ice loss appears to be more important than whether that solution works.”
Barton emphasizes that this chapter is not a critique of the glacier saving movement, but an acknowledgment that “how we talk and think about these movements affects how we frame the underlying issues of climate change and systemic inequality.” impacts, but they do not address the underlying issues of climate change. Focusing too much on “band-aiding the symptoms of these problems can lead to missing the important big picture,” she explains.
As ice continues to shrink and recede across the globe, policymakers and journalists should question the underlying assumption that the movement to save the ice is inherently a good thing. Instead, they should assess whether the movement is addressing the underlying problem, who is leading it, and who is benefiting from it, to identify what looks more like a temporary solution than a long-term one. As the climate situation becomes more severe, community-led, long-term projects focused on mitigating the current and future impacts of glacier loss will be critical to saving mountain communities and alpine ecosystems.
