ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Freezing Temperature: Ice as an Instrument and Proxy in Climate Science

• In Event: Making Global Temperature Across Land, Ice and Oceans

English Abstract

How did ice—an ephemeral substance and long-standing object of sublime reflection—become a nineteenth-century scientific instrument and a twenty-first-century climatic proxy? And how have changing ways of studying, reading, and interpreting ice contributed to the plurality of “global temperature”? Taking ice as one of the key materials through which temperature was measured, inferred, and debated, this paper contributes to the session’s broader exploration of how different environments and practices made temperature into a climatic index.
This paper contrasts two modes and moments of ice research—different in kind, scale, and historical milieu—to examine what ice does in the epistemic construction of climate knowledge. In the nineteenth century, evidence of glacial movement positioned bodies of frozen ice as “instruments”: reliable material witnesses for tracing climatic change through deep time. In the twentieth century, ice cores—whose isotopic signatures enabled reconstructions of past temperatures—recast ice as a “natural proxy” of exceptional resolution and authority.
Drawing on work co-authored with Tom Simpson, this paper contrasts the techniques, discourses, and sites associated with these two moments. By asking whether temperature is found in the field or the laboratory; whether ice functions as an instrument or a proxy; and where ice-knowledge is produced (in the ice-rich poles or the ostensibly “ice-free” tropics), this paper shows how both ice and the temperatures it was said to speak of were historically multiple. In doing so, it contributes to the session’s broader argument that global temperature was never singular but emerged from diverse and sometimes incompatible practices across land, ice, and oceans.

Author

• Alexis Rider, The University of Vienna