ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Whose 'Cryosphere'? Struggles to Define and Institutionalise the Study of the World's Ice in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

• In Event: Universal Claims and Their Consequences in the 20th- and 21st-Century Earth and Climate Sciences

English Abstract

When scholars write about the cryosphere, they often introduce it with reference to its Greek etymology; kryos, meaning cold or ice, seems an apt term to use in defining the Earth's frozen regions. What this etymological fact obscures, however, is that the "cryosphere" as a concept is only a century old. Moreover, Antoni Dobrowolski, who coined the term in 1923, wrote passionately about the difficulties he encountered in promoting the concept, from indifference to explicit rejection by his colleagues. The cryosphere only started to become a mainstream concept in the earth and climate sciences from the 1980s onwards. Little is known about its history in the preceding six decades.

In this paper, I examine the reception and development of the cryosphere concept and its associated science(s) in the 1920s through 1950s. Drawing from correspondence between influential figures in the ice sciences at the time, as well as the publications that emerged out of international geophysical conferences and new journals dedicated to the ice sciences, I show how debates over the concept's merits can be read as struggles to claim epistemic authority and dictate scientific agendas in an emerging area of geophysics. I focus primarily on Dobrowolski's role in these debates, contextualising his struggle in the broader process of institutionalising the study of the cryosphere, whilst also highlighting parallel terminological debates concerning the study of frozen things like permafrost and snowflakes. These hint at a wider history of contestation in the cryospheric sciences of the mid twentieth century. Whilst the cryosphere has taken on a ubiquitous and important role in earth- and climate-science discourse today, a closer look at its conceptual origins reveals that this ubiquity and importance is far from self-evident.

Author

• Floris Winckel, University of Copenhagen