Refracted Worlds: Preserving Ice and Time in the Anthropocene.

• In Event: ‘I Contain Multitudes’: Materials of Making Worlds.

Abstract

This paper asks: what worlds are refracted through ice? In one way, ice gave the world a past: Ice cores, described as ‘archives’ or ‘time machines,’ have been used to articulate and give nuance to a temporally deep planetary system. In another way, ice will redefine the world’s future: As global temperatures rise, melting ice will raise ocean levels, making it the very material that will rapidly reconfigure the earth. Ice, a ‘hot’ natural solid—one that hovers close to its melting point—thus reveals both the slow processes of the earth and the rapid impact of climatological change. In both instances, ice has been instrumental in articulating human-geologic relationships, revealing our geohistory and complicating our geofuture. Ice, then, has been an essential material and agent—sticky yet slippery, deceptively transparent, solid yet fragile— in conceptualizing, defining, and imagining the world in the Anthropocene.

This paper explores the worlds of ice by examining a recent scientific project that mobilizes, and collapses, these different temporal scales. The Ice Memory Project, run by the Université Grenoble Alpes Foundation, is an effort to store ice cores from rapidly disappearing mountain glaciers deep within a snow cave in Antarctica. As polar ice is mobilized to safeguard against the global threat of melting ice, frozen permanence meets rapid decay. The time of ice, and the relationship between human and geologic time, is thus vividly collapsed as the worlds within ice meet.

Author

• Alexis Rider, University of Pennsylvania