Cryosphere hazards such as glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), avalanches, and landslides affect populations in mountain and polar regions worldwide. Climate change exacerbates these hazards, making mountains more unstable through glacier shrinkage and expanding glacial lakes, as the IPCC special report on oceans and the cryosphere demonstrated.
Yet there is still significant need to analyze cryospheric hazards from social science and humanities perspectives—as Glacier Lab research does in various areas from the Andes to the Arctic. The Lab’s goal is to center societies and place-based vulnerabilities, to illuminate social inequalities that heighten the impacts of hazards, to show how hazard science and engineering can themselves affect mountain and polar communities, and to challenge widespread (problematic, simplistic) narratives that cast glacier areas solely through a lens of catastrophe and victimhood.
Mark Carey and the Glacier Lab have conducted extensive research on cryosphere hazards, including GLOFS, avalanches/landslides, and icebergs. For example, Peruvians have experienced some of the world’s most deadly glacier disasters, which Carey analyzes in his book, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (Oxford, 2010); in Spanish/Español: Glaciares, cambio climático y desastres naturales: Ciencia y sociedad en el Perú, traducido por Jorge Bayona (Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos/Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2014).
Most recently, Glacier Lab graduate students Zac Provant (Ph.D. 2024) and Holly Moulton (Ph.D. 2023) have examined cryospheric hazards. Zac analyzes vulnerabilities and the political economy of snow, avalanche, and landslide hazard mapping in Juneau, Alaska. Holly researches Indigenous women’s resilience in the Peruvian Andes while also scrutinizing glacier hazard narratives.
A vital need in cryospheric hazards research is to conduct more interdisciplinary and holistic research with multidisciplinary teams, as Glacier Lab researchers have done for more than a decade, initially examining a 2010 rock-ice slide and ensuing outburst flood from Mount Hualcán and Lake 513, Peru, and more recently studying ice-ocean-society dynamics in Greenland fjords.
A few selected Glacier Lab publications on cryosphere hazards include:
Zachary Provant and Mark Carey, “Hazard zone conflicts in the avalanche capital: Stress points for avalanche and landslide mitigation in Juneau, Alaska,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 98 (Nov. 2023): 104111, pp. 1-10.
Holly Moulton and Mark Carey, “Futuremaking in a disaster zone: Everyday climate change adaptation amongst Quechua women in the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca,” Environmental Science and Policy 148 (2023): 103551, pp. 1-11.
Mark Carey, Graham McDowell, Christian Huggel, Becca Marshall, Holly Moulton, César Portocarrero, Zachary Provant, John M. Reynolds, Luis Vicuña, “A Socio-Cryospheric Systems Approach to Glacier Hazards, Glacier Runoff Variability, and Climate Change,” Snow and Ice-Related Hazards, Risks, and Disasters, 2nd edition, edited by Wilfried Haeberli and Colin Whiteman (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2021), 215-257.