Interdisciplinary Ice-Society Research Projects

Mark Carey and members of the Glacier Lab regularly contribute to interdisciplinary ice-society research projects. By collaborating with scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, Glacier Lab members work to bridge academic disciplines and advance innovative ice-society research.

Carey has made great efforts to inspire more humanities scholars—who tend to work alone, independently, on single-authored publications—to conduct more collaborative interdisciplinary research. In 2023, he published an article with Peter Alagona and Adrian Howkins to explain why environmental historians can, and should, do more collaborative research and coauthoring.

Collaborative projects in the Glacier Lab consist of multidisciplinary research teams working on a variety of topics, funded by large grants from the National Science Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. For example, one of Carey’s research teams created the Transdisciplinary Andean Research Network (TARN) to study glacier hazards and water management in Peru. Another interdisciplinary project focuses on ocean-ice-society interactions in Greenland fjords. Other projects focus on climate change, ice loss, and environmental justice in the Pacific Northwest, particularly through collaborations with oceanographer/earth scientist Dave Sutherland as well as through the Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice.

A sampling of publications from these projects include:

Peter S. Alagona, Mark Carey, and Adrian Howkins, “Better Together? The Values, Obstacles, Opportunities, and Prospects for Collaborative Research in Environmental History,” Environmental History 28, no. 2 (2023): 269-299.

Fiammetta Straneo, Donald Slater, Caroline Bouchard, Mattias R Cape, Mark Carey, Lorenzo Ciannelli, James Holte, Patricia Matrai, Kristin Laidre, Chris Little, Lorenz Meire, Helene Seroussi, and Maria Vernet, “An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Greenland’s Changing Coastal Margins,” Oceanography 35, no. 3-4 (December 2022): https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2022.128.

Adam Emmer, Simon K. Allen, Mark Carey, Holger Frey, Christian Huggel, Oliver Korup, Martin Mergili, Ashim Sattar, Georg Veh, Thomas Y. Chen, Simon J. Cook, Mariana Correas-Gonzalez, Soumik Das, Alejandro Diaz Moreno, Fabian Drenkhan, Melanie Fischer, Walter W. Immerzeel, Eñaut Izagirre, Ramesh Chandra Joshi, Ioannis Kougkoulos, Riamsara Kuyakanon Knapp, Dongfeng Li, Ulfat Majeed, Stephanie Matti, Holly Moulton, Faezeh Nick, Valentine Piroton, Irfan Rashid, Masoom Reza, Anderson Ribeiro de Figueiredo, Christian Riveros, Finu Shrestha, Milan Shrestha, Jakob Steiner, Noah Walker-Crawford, Joanne L. Wood, and Jacob C. Yde, “Progress and Challenges in Glacial Lake Outburst Flood Research (2017-2021): A Research Community Perspective,” Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 22 (2022): 3041-3061.

Zachary Provant, Evan Elderbrock, Andrea Willingham, Mark Carey, Alessandro Antonello, Carlos Moffat, Dave Sutherland, and Sakina Shahid, “Reframing Antarctica’s Ice Loss: Impacts of Cryospheric Change on Local Human Activity,” Polar Record 57, e13 (2021): 1-11.

Mark Carey, Michel Baraer, Bryan G. Mark, Adam French, Jeffrey Bury, Kenneth R. Young, and Jeffrey M. McKenzie, “Toward Hydro-Social Modeling: Merging Human Variables and the Social Sciences with Climate-Glacier Runoff Models (Santa River, Peru),” Journal of Hydrology 518, Part A (2014): 60-70.

Mark Carey, Christian Huggel, Jeffrey Bury, César Portocarrero, and Wilfried Haeberli, “An Integrated Socio-Environmental Framework for Glacier Hazard Management and Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons from Lake 513, Cordillera Blanca, Peru,” Climatic Change 112, nos. 3-4 (2011): 733-767.