The Danish anthropologist Mattias Borg Rasmussen has recently published a book, Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru (University of Washington Press, 2015), which addresses the economic, political, social and culture dynamics of a community that is facing glacier retreat and water scarcity. The book shows how environmental change and institutional politics are intertwined in […]

The rock, gravel, sand and fine particles that are trapped under glaciers for millennia undergo major changes as glaciers retreat. Once they are exposed to the atmosphere, they are colonized by a variety of organisms and develop soils. They shift from having relatively few species of bacteria to developing more complex ecosystems. Studying nematodes — or roundworms […]

GlacierHub is looking for contributions to a video that we are preparing to distribute before COP21, the major international climate conference that will be held in Paris this December. We hope that you, as a reader of our website, could join us in this project. We plan our video to include a number of short segments […]

Mont Blanc: fresh row over territory as France blocks glacier access   “A fresh row over borders has erupted between France and Italy on Mont Blanc – or Monte Bianco – after the mayor of Chamonix blocked access to a precarious glacier that the Italians claim is in their territory. Eric Fournier took the decision to […]

Joerg Schaefer, a geoscience researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, specializes in tracing the history of moraines through cosmogenic radionuclide dating. He depicts the results of his research in maps of moraines–the accumulation of glacial till and sediment at the end, or snout, of a glacier, or along its sides. While scientific in nature, the […]

Glacier retreat, as an easily observable consequence of climate change, also embodies spiritual significance to local communities.  In some cases, local perceptions of glacier melt differ from that of the scientific community. In a new paper, Elizabeth Allison of the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, looks at three instances of glacial decline in sacred mountain […]

François Quévillon is an artist from Montreal whose work engages directly with questions of human experience of the world, at a time when nature itself is in deep crisis, and when human perception is shaped by the intrusion of media and technology into many domains of life. He refuses to slot himself as someone who […]

“This book is several books in one,” clarifies Jorge Daniel Taillant in the introductory pages of his newest book, Glaciers: The Politics of Ice. A melding of narration, primary sources, and vivid characters, Taillant’s Glaciers recounts the formulation of the world’s first national glacial protection law in Argentina in 2010, from the first inklings of […]

  Shrinking Glacier Is Backdrop to Obama’s Message on Climate Change “President Barack Obama hiked to a shrinking glacier Tuesday, traveling to this icy expanse to deliver a visual message to the country: This is what climate change looks like. Mr. Obama spent the day in the Kenai Mountains, exploring Exit Glacier, which has retreated as […]

Gustavo Valdivia, an anthropology PhD student at Johns Hopkins University, as well as a former contributor to GlacierHub, went on an expedition to Quelccaya Glacier in the Peruvian Andes this summer, led by the prominent glaciologist Lonnie Thompson. In a recent email to GlacierHub, he wrote, “In these photos, I try to document the way that […]

United States President Barack Obama announced this week he would officially change the name of Mount McKinley, North America’s tallest peak, back to Denali, the original Native American name for the mountain. Mount McKinley was named after Republican President William McKinley more than a century ago, but the name Denali has older roots in the language of […]

United States President Barack Obama visited a glacier near Seward Tuesday during a trip to Alaska, making him the second American president to make an official visit to a  glacier. On his trip, Obama took the opportunity to discuss the effects of climate change with Alaska Natives, fishermen and residents of the northernmost state. “We view […]