vital ice

The snow that lay over the glacier looked strange to him, as if it were a white grass growing up out of the ice. It bent to his touch and straightened again, like grass-blades. He ceased to crawl and sat up, pushing back his hood so he could see around him. As far as he could see lay fields of the snow-grass, white and shining. There were groves of white trees, with white leaves growing on them. The sun shone, and it was windless, and everything was white.

-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

We don't often think of ice as a lively substance. Vast tracks of frozen terrain call to mind wastelands, blue-lipped hypothermia, and the dead, blackened flesh of frost bite. In Haldor Laxness's novel, Under the Glacier, Iceland's Snæfellsjökul serves as an icy graveyard for a mysterious coffin that launches the protagonist's adventures. Imaginaries of icy death are easy to conjure. And yet, since the eighteenth century, people have written about glacier ice as if it were teeming with vitality. Poets, naturalists, scientists, and environmentalists have used vitalistic metaphors to describe the dynamism and awesomeness of the "everlasting snows."

The summit of Snaefellsjökull seen from Hellisandur. Photo credit: Wolfgang Sauber (2009).

Some of the earliest and most poetic descriptions of vital ice can be found the writings of the Romantics. In "Resolution and Independence" (1888), Wordsworth described glacial erratics, large boulders deposited by receding glaciers, as things “endued with sense”:

like a sea beast crawled forth, which on a shelf

Of rock or sand reposted there to sun itself;

Keeping with serpentine themes, in "Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni," Percy Shelley penned what are perhaps the most famous lines ever written about glaciers:

The glaciers creep

Like snakes that watch their prey from their far fountains,

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice

Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power

Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,

Percy's lines have since inspired many an epigraph. In these Romantic descriptions of ice, vitality is closely linked with monstrosity, the living meets the grotesque. This is the ice of Mary Shelley's arctic wasteland through which Dr. Frankenstein pursues his monster. It is a relic of older literary traditions in which mountains were thought to be the gloomy abodes of evil spirits. Shelley’s verse ends:

A city of death, distant with many a tower

And wall impregnable of beaming ice.

The sublime is laced with fear.

​"The Glacier du Tacconay" from The Ascent of Mont Blanc, a series of four views (ca. 1855).

The Shelleys visited Mont Blanc in 1816; at this time local naturalists were venturing onto Swiss glaciers, trying to determine their past extent and the nature of their motion. In 1839, Louis Agassiz, who would later move to America and found Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, brought the Ice Age theory to English-speaking men of science at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The Scottish geologist, James David Forbes, was one of the men Agassiz inspired to study Alpine glaciers. He writes in The Glacier Theory (1861):

in a summer’s day the glacier is oozing out its substance from every pore —above, beneath, within. And yet, with all this the glacier wastes not; always consuming, it is never destroyed

unless we have advanced so far as to analyze the origins of glaciers, the causes of their subsistence, and the conditions of their internal economy

the accumulation of the snow in the higher ice-fields during the year, and especially in winter, forms not only the pabulum for the growth of the glacier, but is the glacier itself

Oozing from their pores, consuming, subsisting, feeding upon pabulum: Forbes' glaciers grow and decay. The first quotation retains echoes of the monstrosity found in the Romantics' writings, but, when considered alongside the other quotations, points to another way of thinking vitalistically about ice: in terms of metabolism. Forbes' glaciers grow, consume, and waste away like living creatures.

Forbes’ metabolic metaphors appear downright dull when compared with the work of another nineteenth-century naturalist:

The bergs were crowded in a dense pack against the ice-wall, as if the storm-wind had determined to make the glacier take back her crystal offspring and keep them at home

This vigorous, purple prose belongs to the one and only John Muir, for whom glaciers were but a part of dynamic, spiritualized nature. Muir was America's glacier prophet. He was responsible for recognizing Yosemite's landscape as the work of ancient glaciers, and in 1879, he paid his first of many visits to the tidewater glaciers of Alaska. In his writings, glaciers are active agents of geological transformation; under their icy quilts, landscapes incubate like eggs under a hen.

Emerging from its icy sepulcher, it gives a most telling illustration of the birth of a marked feature of a landscape. In this instance it is not the mountain, but the glacier, that is in labor, and the mountain itself is being brought forth

The front of the Muir Glacier in Glacier Bay, Alaska, from Samuel Hall Young's Alaska Days with John Muir (1915).

In Muir we spot the beginnings of a new trend in glacier metaphors: parturition. Muir’s feminine glaciers have "glacier wombs,” and they shape landscapes through the processes of gestation and childbirth. This is not the passive Nature of Francis Bacon, who only reveals her true self to the active, probing natural philosopher; Muir’s nature is dynamic and incomplete, ever in the process of becoming:

Standing here in the deep, brooding silence all the wilderness seems motionless, as if the work of creation were done. But in the midst of this outer steadfastness we know there is incessant motion and change […] Here are the roots of all the life of the valleys, and here more simply than elsewhere is the eternal flux of Nature manifested. Ice changing to water, lake to meadows, and mountains to plains.

In the early twentieth century, those who followed Muir in the study of glaciers borrowed freely from the language of anatomy and zoology, though none as floridly as the glacier prophet himself. Israel C. Russell, one of the first to systematically study the fluctuations of Alaska’s glaciers, wrote of his field sites as regions where “great glaciers are birthed.” The geologist Harry Fielding Reid referred to the “habits” of glaciers, and his contemporary, William S. Vaux, recognized that “the great ice beasts,” with head walls, snouts, tongues, toes, and movement, were “truly anthropomorphized.” Even today, the tremendous process by which tidewater glaciers create icebergs is called “calving.”

As the twentieth century wore on, anatomical metaphors gave way to more technical terms. One glaciologist rejected the term “snout” as vulgar, preferring “terminus” as more professional. The idea of glaciers as organisms, however, proved more lasting. In 1988, CalTech glaciologist Robert Sharp wrote:

Glaciers are active creatures, delicately attuned to their environment. They can be brutally overpowering yet surprising sensitive to subtle influences when exercising their strength. They expand and shrink, advance and recede, enjoy robust health and suffer unsightly deterioration. Like humans, they win victories and suffer defeats. They work diligently and vigorously at their tasks and display more common sense, economically, than most modern governments in maintaining balanced budgets. Glaciers prefer to inhabit cold, wet places…

This quotation is taken from Sharp’s book Living Ice: Understanding Glaciers and Glaciation. His glaciers are sensitive creatures, delicately attuned to their environments, enjoying health or suffering from disease. It is 1988, a year of unprecedented heatwaves, climatologist James Hansen’s congressional testimony on global warming, and the birth year of the International Panel on Climate Change. As historian Mark Carey notes, in the era of global warming, glaciers are most often cast as “endangered species,” as icons of environmentalism.

Grinnell Glacier in Montana's Glacier National Park, image courtesy of USGS (2009).

Glaciers are well cast in these roles. They are, in the words of one glaciologist, “sentinels of climate change that appear to be more sensitive to the climate than are humans, [and] are disappearing at an unprecedented pace, the canaries in climate change’s coal mine.” The striking aquamarine of glacial ice, rendered razor sharp in the form of digital media, only adds to their aesthetic charisma as symbols of a warming world. Today, glaciologists speak of retreating, shrinking, and stagnating glaciers. They speak of glacier health: what might be good for them, what might be bad. They speak of what may or may not save the glaciers, how they might survive.

Writing in 2015, University of British Columbia glaciologist Garry K.C. Clarke explicitly compared the study of glaciers to that of dying languages or endangered animals:

Last year’s bad winter is not going to save the glaciers. On average, climate is changing, and it’s not changing in ways that are good for glacier survival.

It is unsurprising that glaciers are amenable to the language of endangerment. They are dynamic entities that ebb and flow, surge and retreat in ways visible to the unaided eye. Their dynamism has inspired poets, naturalists, and scientists to use vitalistic language to describe them as living creatures. And yet behind this vitalistic language are the geophysical and geological facts of glaciers. They are accumulations of snow that congeal into ice and flow like plastics. They are not alive, and ultimately, it is not their well-being that worries us, it is our own.