glacial nightmares

“The glaciers are coming! The glaciers are coming!” It’s not the most sophisticated pun, but we can perhaps forgive Play Boy; it is, after all, Play Boy, and it was the seventies, and the pun could only be a pun in this context. The magazine was covering science news in its own unique way, illustrating the possibility of a new ice age with a cartoon of a suggestively posed beach babe, frozen in an instant of playful sensuality. In the 1970s, Play Boy was not alone in publishing copy about ice ages. Much more staid sources like The New York Times, Science Digest, and Science News were also running stories about the possibility of global cooling; today, climate scientists refer to this media event as the “myth of global cooling.”

As we watch the mean global temperature rise and worry about how many degrees it will take until we’re up the proverbial creek without our trusty proverbial paddle, it is hard to imagine that fifty years ago anyone was worried about another ice age. Yet some were. In the 1960s, climate scientists began to notice that mean global temperatures had been dropping since the forties. The winters of 1972 and 1973 felt longer and harsher to many inhabitants of the northern hemisphere. In the summer of 1972, it was rumoured that Baffin Island did not lose its covering of winter snow, and that Icelanders were penned in by a peculiar amount of sea ice. “Nuclear winter” would not enter the language until 1983, but unusual cold and ice were on peoples' minds by the early seventies.

Tough winters alone did not spawn fears of another ice age: for a brief period, contemporary climate science contributed some credibility to the idea. The myth of global cooling was indeed a myth, built upon partial understanding and incomplete evidence, it nonetheless included scientifically credible elements (this is not to say that it contained true elements, but that it contained hypotheses and facts generated through credible scientific practices). “The Glaciers are Coming!” covers a conference that took place at Brown University in January of 1972, which asked how and when the present interglacial would come to an end. Scientists knew that evidences of multiple ice ages were buried deep in the Earth’s history, and that the climate of the Holocene —the geological era in which human history resided— was generally more pacific than much of what came before it. If natural causes alone were considered, it was only a matter of time before the next glacial period. The conference released a statement which appeared in Science later that year, it stated (among other things):

Warm intervals like the present one have been short-lived and the natural end of our warm epoch is undoubtedly near when considered on a geological time scale. Global cooling and related rapid changes of environment, substantially exceeding the fluctuations experienced by man in historical times, must be expected within the next few millennia or even centuries. [emphasis mine]

This statement, agreed to by the majority, but not all, of the conference attendees, was quickly challenged and refined (already climate scientists were hot on the trail of global warming); nonetheless the idea of an oncoming ice age—though potentially millennia in the future—caught the media's attention.

The myth of global cooling had other scientific headwaters. Researchers concerned with the atmospheric effects of aerosols were considering the effects of human-generated particulate matter; some suggested that in sufficient quantities, such particles could absorb enough of the sun’s radiation to trigger an ice age. Such research was young and impetuous. It was but the tip of a climate science iceberg, and a projection of global cooling did not represent a consensus among climate scientists. This was shown in 2008 by NOAA scientist Thomas Peterson and his colleagues, who set out to investigate the credibility of the idea that 1970s scientists preached a doctrine of global cooling.

Peterson et al conducted a literature review of the electronic databases of Nature, JSTOR and the American Meteorological Society. They demonstrated that between 1965 and 1979, of the scientific articles concerned with climatic change on a human time scale, very few were concerned with the possibility of global cooling: a grand total of 7; considerably more were concerned with the possibility of global warming: 44. The authors concluded that perpetuation of the myth of 1970s global cooling resulted from selective misreadings of the scientific literature, both then and more recently, and suggested that not all of such readings were innocent mistakes.

Peterson and his team focused on the scientific literature, and showed that it gave no reason to think there was a consensus around the idea of global cooling. In their explanation of the myth’s tenacity in popular media, they emphasized the psychological effects of weather: cold winters made a reading public only too ready to hear explanations of weather in terms of climate. It turns out we often believe that one swallow makes a summer. But that is not all. The ice also deserves consideration. Threats from individual glaciers can easily elide into fears about mass glaciation.

Glaciers have long inspired fear and deference in people who live near them. In pre-Enlightenment Europe, peasants living in the valleys below Alpine glaciers regarded the great ice beasts as unpredictable harbingers of destruction. In North America, Tlingit oral history contains stories of touchy glaciers responding ferociously to human hubris or irreverence. Anthropologist Julie Cruikshank documented in her book Do Glaciers Listen? (the answer is yes) that the collective cultural memories of Tlingit and Athapaskan peoples hold important moral lessons about living with glaciers: for instance, one does not whistle at them and one does not fry bacon in their presence. In a tale of Glacier Bay, Alaska, a young woman, Kaasteen, bored with menstrual confinement, whistles to the glacier at the head of the bay with charmed fish bones. Her reward for tempting the ice is to be sacrificed to its destruction while the rest of her people relocate to safer village sites along Icy Strait. Living near active glaciers teaches one to not taunt the ice, and to be wary of its variable tempers.

In the nineteenth century localized fears of unpredictable glaciers expanded in geographical scope. The ice age theory brought a new understanding of the variability of climate history and awakened the possibility of a future entombed in ice. Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist often credited with formulating the ice age theory, saw everywhere geological signs of a prehistoric flash freeze, and wrote with biblical gusto about the “silence of death” that fell upon “the life and movement of a powerful creation”:

Springs paused, rivers ceased to flow, the rays of the sun, rising upon this frozen shore (if, indeed, it was reached by them), were met only by the breath of the winter from the north and thunders of the crevasses as they opened across the surface of this ice sea.

Agassiz could harness apocalyptic dread with the best of the Revelations writers. Inferring from the motions of individual glaciers, he conjured up scenes of prehistoric world endings that scraped the Earth’s surface clean of life. For the devout Agassiz, the Old Testament deluge was a glacial nightmare. Past catastrophes can easily inspire dread of future ones, and with advent of the ice age theory, fears about individual glaciers could be projected onto a global scale.

In the mid-1960s, glaciers were making news. On August 30, 1965, the Swiss ski resort of Saas-Fee made international news when an avalanche of 500 000 tons of glacial ice and rock buried between 88 and 96 construction workers at the Mattmark dam site. Three days later a second ice surge threatened rescue workers who were struggling to extract victims from the ruin. Coloradans learned of the Swiss tragedy through regional newspapers; deadly glaciers were no doubt a topic of local interest.

On October 30, the following year, the front page of the New York Times advertised “Galloping Glaciers” in the Pacific Northwest. The article draws upon startling language, reporting a “spectacular number of glacial surges,” referring to them as “catastrophic advances” and glaciers gone “beserk.” In his statements for the Times, glaciologist Mark Meier casually associated glacial fluctuations with global climatic change, stating, “one theory to explain earth’s periodic ice ages suggests that a surge in the immense Antarctic ice cap may have triggered glaciations in the past.” But Meier knew that relations between climate and glacial surges were poorly understood; he suggested that the causes of surges were likely internal to the ice—thus unlikely to be signs of an oncoming ice age—and requiring more investigation.

Glacial surges were news-worthy catastrophes at the cutting edge of glaciology in the 1960s. Scientists’ limited understandings of glacier dynamics created a space for wild speculations about the power of ice. Since the nineteenth century, glaciers have invited analogies from the local to the global. Combined with ice’s ability to capture the imagination (see post Dec. 14, 2015), these analogies can operate as vectors for fears about catastrophic climatic change. Fear of ice has deep-rooted and specific origins, but can manifest itself in the culture as a diffuse and global threat.

But, of course, fears of a glacial nightmare were unsupported by scientific evidence. Which is why Play Boy could make them into a joke.