Category Archives: Lab News

The Glacier Lab in DC: Navigating the New Arctic Community Meeting and Archival Research at the Library of Congress and National Archives

In March 2023, members of the Glacier Lab for the Study of Ice and Society traveled to Washington, D.C. for a National Science Foundation (NSF) conference and research at the Library of Congress and National Archives.

First, Glacier Lab director Mark Carey and graduate students Dara Craig, Zachary Provant, Nicole Schaub, and Sijo Smith attended the National Science Foundation’s 2024 Navigating the New Arctic Annual Community Meeting. They were joined by Glacier Lab alum Holly Moulton, who is now an assistant professor as West Virginia University. In addition to learning about knowledge co-creation and groundbreaking Arctic research projects, the Glacier Lab presented two posters at this Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) meeting. Dara Craig and Sijo Smith presented their research and community-oriented work on “Engaging Students in Anticolonial Research for Tribal and Academic Partnerships,” which was funded by a grant from the Andew Mellon Foundation. Mark Carey and Nicole Schaub presented “Framing Greenland Fjords: How US Media Outlets Can Undermine NNA Objectives.” They conducted this research with two Glacier Lab undergraduates, Olivia Black and Mira Cross, and it is part of Carey’s collaborative NSF project studying glacial fjords in Greenland. The NNA conference was a productive opportunity to listen to Indigenous keynote speakers, network with Arctic researchers, and learn more about conducting interdisciplinary NSF research.

Following the NNA conference, Glacier Lab members headed for the archives to conduct research. First, they completed the required trainings to enter the Library of Congress Reading Room. This gave them access to the Bernt Balchen papers—documents that detailed Balchen’s time as a pilot in Greenland. During this archival research, Glacier Lab members were looking for historical documents that discussed Balchen’s interactions with Greenlanders. After wrapping up at the Library of Congress, the Glacier Lab shifted their attention to National Archives I. At this location, they combed through U.S. Coast Guard documents to find early military activity in Greenland. Similar to the Bernt Balchen papers, the Glacier Lab was hunting for documents that illuminated U.S. Coast Guard interactions with Greenlanders—especially near U.S. military bases. This research not only advanced Mark Carey’s collaborative NSF-funded project on Greenland fjords—it also provided the graduate students with an opportunity for training in collaborative archival work.

 

Beyond the NNA conference and the archival research, the Glacier Lab used the trip to D.C. as an opportunity to spend time together off campus and enjoy the capitol’s culture and history. In the evenings, the groups visited museums, walked the mall, and laughed in underground pubs. Nicole Schaub described it well:

“Sharing this experience was an invaluable opportunity to learn from and work with other Glacier Lab members. From navigating the National Archives, to engaging at the NNA conference, to exploring the sites of the Washington Mall, we worked together in a variety of contexts, strengthening both the academic and the interpersonal bonds that are essential to collaboration.”

 

Student and Faculty Winners of Climate Justice Awards

Two UO students and two UO faculty won the 2021 awards for research and teaching related to ice, society, and climate justice in the Pacific Northwest, with funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation through the Just Futures Institute.

Students Jessica Gladis and Anna Mattson won the 2021 Undergraduate Summer Research Awards. Jessica’s project involved research on “Hermeneutic phenomenology: How perceptions of place form differing attitudes towards agency and climate change” focused on the Mount Rainier region to uncover climate values and experiences with glaciers. Professor Barbara Muraca (Philosophy/Environmental Studies) served as her faculty mentor. Anna’s project focused on “Glaciers, salmon, and environmental justice in Cordova, Alaska,” from a journalistic and storytelling perspective. Her faculty mentor was Professor Torsten Kjellstrand (Journalism).

Faculty members Casey Shoop and Gordon Sayre won the 2021 Course Development Grants for Ice and Environmental Justice. Professor Casey Shoop plans to teach a Clark Honors College course on “The Ice Archives,” which will grapple with how “glacial ice is both a medium of storage and the material of storytelling.” The course will ask students to explore not only how ice records the past but how stories, meaning, and even injustices are embedded in ice and what we say about glaciers. Professor Gordon Sayre plans to teach an Environmental Studies/Folklore course on “Ice and Fire in the Cascades: Memory, Energy, Recreation.” This course, to be taught in Spring 2022, aims to put knowledge about “glacial and geophysical deep time into a productive relationship with the modern timescales and methodologies of folklore and environmental humanities.”

More course development and student research awards will be offered for Summer 2022, so stay tuned for future calls. Congratulations to Jessica, Anna, Casey, and Gordon!

Lab Member Presentations

Hayley Brazier presenting research at the 2018 ASEH conference in Riverside, CA

 

Hayley Brazier, Ph.D. candidate in Environmental History, recently presented lab research on ocean-ice dynamics at the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) in Riverside, CA. Her poster was titled “Re-Envisioning the Difference Between Land and Sea: The Case of Ice in the Southern Ocean.” It was part of research she has been doing related to two of the lab’s current National Science Foundation grants on the history of glaciology and ocean-ice-society interactions in Antarctica.

 

 

 

Mark Carey presenting at the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library) in Peru, March 2018.

Mark Carey also presented at the ASEH conference in March 2018, offering arguments about the need for more multi-disciplinary research that includes not only historians and natural scientists but other disciplines as well, from engineering and anthropology to philosophy and geography. Carey also presented his research in Peru at the National Council for Science, Technology, and Technical Innovation (CONCYTEC) at a symposium on ” ‘Desastres naturales’ en el Perú: Investigación científica y marco institucional de acción.” Carey’s presentation was on “Perspectivas sociales sobre la desglaciación, avalanchas y deslizamiento de tierras,” with an emphasis on historical lessons for future planning and programs in risk reduction related to glacier shrinkage in the Andes. His corresponding article on the presentation can be found here.

Cascadia Environmental History Retreat

Glacier Lab members Hayley Brazier, Holly Moulton, and Mark Carey recently attended the 2017 Cascadia Environmental History Retreat at Friday Harbor, Washington. Also attending from UO were Marsha Weisiger (co-organizer), Ryan Jones, Nichelle Frank, and Olivia Wing.  The retreat attracts graduate students and faculty from Pacific Northwest universities from British Columbia to Washington and Oregon. Activities focus on scholarship, professional development, and community building, as explained by lab member Hayley Brazier in her 2016 article “Practicing in Place: The Environmental History Retreat.”

The Univ of Oregon group attending the Cascadia Environmental History Retreat, Lime Kiln State Park, Washington, 2017.

Mountaineering, Citizen Science, and Glaciers

Our new article analyzing the history of glaciology and glacier research in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca suggests that citizen science conducted by mountain climbers, guides, and porters could augment the professional research about glaciers conducted by scientists. The article profiles, for example, the work of University of Innsbruck geographer and glaciologist Hans Kinzl from the 1930s to the 1960s to demonstrate that his time spent climbing Andean mountains and interacting with alpine residents and local communities facilitated his research agenda.  Spending time in the mountains, on glaciers, and with local residents remains helpful for effective glacier research.  In this way, mountaineers’ observations and data collection, such as information about rapidly changing glacial lakes, glacier stability, and mountain conditions, may offer useful information useful information for scientists and climate adaptation projects.  Several new programs—from Adventure Scientists and the American Climber Science Program to Girls on Ice, the Office de Haute Montagne, and Alp-Risk—offer just some of the examples of these kinds of innovations in citizen science related to high mountains, climate change, and glaciers around the world.  Our article concludes by suggesting that the ideal end result of citizen science by the larger mountaineering community that includes guides and porters would be increased knowledge generation and sharing, expanded public awareness, reduced risk of glacier-related disasters, and improved environmental management to help a broad range of stakeholders.

New Article on Glacier Runoff and Mountain Societies

Members of the Glacier Lab, along with several other colleagues, have published a new global analysis of the societal dimensions of glacier runoff.  Published as part of a 2017 special issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers (vol. 107, no. 2), the article provides one of the first global and comparative assessments of water dynamics in glacier-fed watersheds.  There is a large gap in research to date because so few social science and humanities (or human-focused studies) have been conducted.  Our team found that, within the limited research that does exist, studies focus primarily in four areas: social impacts, hydropower, agriculture and food security, and cultural effects.

Importantly, we found that several “next steps” could enhance existing literature.  In particular, future research could more clearly and explicitly attribute changing water use practices to glacier runoff variation. In essence, it is not enough to say simply that glaciers are shrinking and thus water conflicts will arise because water allocation and usage depends on a host of variables — from power and politics to economics, water rights laws, crop preferences and markets, cultural values, available infrastructure and technologies, social inequalities, and environmental forces.  Glacier change is thus but only one factor affecting water distribution, and not everyone will be affected equally from glacier runoff variability.  The literature to date, however, focuses almost exclusively on the role of climate change and glacier loss when making bold, sometimes exaggerated, claims about the effects of glacier retreat on downstream societies.  In the end, one goal of the paper is to help “redefine and reorient the glacier-water problem around human societies rather than simply around ice and climate.”

The author team consists of Glacier Lab members Mark Carey, Olivia Molden, and M Jackson, as well as anthropologist Mattias Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen), hydrologist/glaciologist Anne Nolin (Oregon State University), and climatologist/geoscientist Bryan Mark (Ohio State University).

New Glacier Lab Research Assistants Hired for Summer 2016

Several Clark Honors College undergraduate students have been hired as research assistants in the Glacier Lab for summer 2016.  They are working on various glacier-related projects, including:

    • Indigenous peoples and climate change in the Andes; glacier protection and conservation in South America (Josie Kinney)
    • Glacier hazards; ice cores and humanities; virtual water in glacier-fed watersheds (Rebecca Marshall)
    • Climate and health (Candace Joyner)
    • Web design and research dissemination for the Glaciers and Society website (Chris Ableidinger)
    • Glaciers, national parks, and conservation (Doug Sam)
IMG_1748

Undergraduate research assistants in the field, Cordillera Blanca, Peru

Glacier Lab member Hayley Brazier is also conducting research on icebergs and marine environmental history

The Trouble with Climate Change and National Parks

Mark Carey has published a chapter in the new book, National Parks beyond the Nation: Global Perspectives on “America’s Best Idea”, edited by Adrian Howkins, Jared Orsi, and Mark Fiege (Oklahoma, 2016). Carey’s chapter compares climate change rhetoric, discours

National-Parks-Beyond-the-Nation-cover

e, and perspectives in Glacier National Park (USA) and Huascaran National Park (Peru). He argues that the climate discourse exposes and builds on longstanding perceptions of national parks, which are different in both regions. The chapter brings a critical perspective to other studies that focus primarily on documenting climate change impacts in parks. Instead Carey asks why people want to be saving those parks in the first place, how the efforts diverge or perpetuate trends from the past, and what exactly they are trying to save (or not).

Overall, the edited collection featuring the work of prominent scholars working around the world is an excellent contribution to scholarship on national parks globally.

 

Feminist glaciology study published

Glacier Lab members Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, and former Lab member Jaclyn Rushing recently published a study on “Glaciers, Gender, and Science” in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Human Geography. The journal Science recently profiled this article in an interview with Carey.

The concept of “feminist glaciology” is new to many people. It addresses the fact that, while women are more likely to be harmed or negatively affected by glacial melt than men, women’s voices are also less often heard in the context of glacier knowledge.  Furthermore, the study shows that glaciology has been imbued historically (and up to the present) not only with many more men than women, but also with masculinist cultures of exploration, geopolitics, and domination.  Credibility when it comes to glacier knowledge today is often still based on these masculinist undertones.

The article provides an overview of these issues, calling for a new approach to global environmental change research– a framework that considers gender dynamics in environmental (climate, glaciology, hydrology) knowledge as well as one that integrates the social sciences and humanities with natural sciences. The production of a more comprehensive knowledge base is critical to addressing changing environmental conditions worldwide, with the goal of more just and equitable adaptation to global change.