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To Ulises, my son, who constantly surprises me with youth’s fresh and fearless, intrepid and baggage-free questioning of the status quo and with his envious unapologetic approach to life and everything.
Foreword
Between the time I submitted the first version of this manuscript in early 2020 and the time I submitted the last version in early 2021, the world changed.
Major events occurred in 2020 that were so great and so relevant to the topic of this book (climate change and melting glaciers) that it is hard to pinpoint a single change-event that is more significant than others. At the very moment I submitted this manuscript, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were announced as the president elect and vice president elect of the United States of America—Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump with the largest amount of votes ever cast for a presidential candidate. Biden and Harris ran on a strong platform that included taking decisive action to stop climate change.1 Since their taking office in January of 2021, they’ve ordered some of the most ambitious climate policies we’ve ever seen, anywhere.2
In 2020 we also saw the most devastating climate wildfires ever recorded in California, burning millions of acres of forest. California Governor Gavin Newsom announced, from the embers of a still-burning climate wildfire, that discussion was over, that climate change was real, that it was here and that we had to do more, that we had to do it better, and that we had to do it faster. He also announced that the targets we had set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (and California has some of the highest and most aggressive targets on the planet) were insufficient. Soon afterward, California chose to eliminate the internal combustion engine for vehicles produced in the state by 2035 and for trucks by 2045.3
But clearly the change-event that will mark 2020 for all of history and for the entire planet was that the world was hit with a global health pandemic: COVID-19, the novel coronavirus, a new pandemic disease that radically altered our lives. I remember over the last several years speaking with my kids about climate change on many different occasions and expressing my frustration that the sorts of actions we needed globally and locally to really address climate change were not very likely to happen in our modern lives. They seemed too far-fetched and against the grain of our fast-moving society. In the mix of ideas we talked about, the world needed to stop for a few weeks each year, maybe even for a month, to help lower green house gas emissions, but this was nearly impossible to envision with our hustle and bustle lifestyles—industries, economies, and people simply could not just “stop.”
Well, we did.
And guess what, in two weeks the air cleared all over the world. Suddenly people in cities hundreds of miles away from the tallest peaks of the Himalayas could see snow-capped mountains that they hadn’t seen for decades, or ever. Large schools of fish returned to bays that they had abandoned due to the pollution and disturbance from commerce, industry, and shipping. Wild animals returned to empty urban environments, wandering around areas where people had abruptly vanished.
The sudden outbreak of a global health pandemic hit the planet like a global earthquake, revealing our extreme vulnerability to Mother Nature. It showed us (and
still does as I submit the very final edits to this manuscript in April of 2021 with the COVID-19 infection rate suddenly rising again across the USA) that in the end, Nature and the state of the environment governs our lives and not the other way around, and unless we safely adapt to our environment and live in harmony with it, we are all highly vulnerable to its fluctuations, its reactions, and its abrupt changes, be they natural or human-induced.
COVID-19 taught us (and is still teaching us) several useful lessons. One is that we can stop pollution and improve our environment and that we can do it very quickly if we act collectively. We also saw that political will and trillions of dollars can suddenly materialize from political leaders to do what needs to be done to address a global emergency. In this case it was for a health pandemic, but why not for climate? We’ll get into that question later.
I think it is also important to consider that these sudden changes in social, political, economic, and industrial behavior as a response to COVID-19 presented a critical opportunity and lesson for youth. I am of Generation X, born in 1968. At 53, I carry the baggage of the global failure to adequately address our environmental problems and the even more worrying failure of our incapacity to contain climate change. Over the years as an environmental policy advocate, I have learned how difficult it is to align political leaders, industry, business, and everyday people to do the right thing to address our environmental pollution and to work to halt and reverse our climate emergency.
Our world’s youth, coming of age now during the COVID-19 pandemic, with respect to our climate challenge and to our climate emergency, are baggage-free. As young adults forging their social and political minds, my own two children, now aged 20 and 17, have no baggage as they walk into this climate emergency. They see examples and opportunities that I had never seen. In two weeks, at a global scale, we cleaned our air. Industry stopped. Pollution stopped (clearly not all of it, but much of it), and the planet healed for a short time. I’ve included a special chapter at the end of this book (Chapter 10) where I reprint an article that I published in April 2020 with a young women nearly one third my age, positing shared and different generational visions of what it takes to resolve climate change. I am happy to see that our youth have a more positive outlook on how things will play out. The planet needs it, and it needs leaders like Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage climate activist that has declared to our political leaders and to people like you and me, “how dare you!”4 Everyone should listen to Greta’s “how dare you” speech, take it to heart, and remember it always as we move forward. I encourage you to stop now for a moment and listen to Greta’s speech before you read on. It’s truly moving.
Our present leaders, but more importantly our future leaders, have learned through COVID-19 that we can turn things around, that we can make a difference, that we can stop polluting, and if we really want to do it, we can fix our climate problem. That gives me hope, and it should give our global society hope.
In early 2020 I had drafted a pre-COVID-19 foreword to this book, where of course, there was no mention of our global pandemic. As the first months of 2020 advanced, the manuscript was becoming quickly outdated on issues related strictly to the topic of this book, glacier melt and its relevance to our lives. Articles about rapid glacier
melt were already appearing in early 2020 that showed things were changing quickly. I created a list of articles and studies that were popping up weekly, sometimes daily, of issues I should mention and reference in the various chapters of this book. The list kept growing, outpacing the time available to address each point. Glaciers were melting and they continue to melt, faster than previously thought and expected. Ice all around the world is disappearing, and it’s disappearing fast.
During this calendar year as I went back and forth with the publisher with edits to the manuscript, troubling articles appeared, such as “Massive Ice Melt in Greenland Last Year Shattered Previous Records.” This was a piece from August 2020 in the LA Times, indicating that 586 billion tons of ice (the equivalent of 140 trillion gallons of water) melted in Greenland during 2019. To get a sense of this volume, that’s enough water to cover the entire state of California in four feet of water. Researchers are affirming over and over again that ice is not only melting, but that it’s melting at a faster and faster pace.5
Another article that appeared while I was editing this manuscript indicated that the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is already past a point of no return and that efforts to stop global warming will not stop it from disintegrating. Basically it’s too late. According to the scientists at Ohio State University who make this assertion, the Greenland Ice Sheet sheds about 280 billion metric tons of ice each year on average, making it the single biggest contributor to sea level rise. This meltdown of the Greenland Ice Sheet is so great that it actually changes the gravitational field over Greenland, and by the end of the century, global sea level will rise about 3 feet because of it alone.6 This will change the landscape around the world, particularly in low-lying states such as Florida and in entire countries such as the Maldives, which will have to consider relocating most or all of its population.
Chris Mooney, on the Washington Post’s Climate Change beat, published an article earlier in the year with the title: “Unprecedented Data Confirms that Antarctica’s Most Dangerous Glacier is Melting from Below.”7 The article went on to describe the reasons for the melting of this faraway glacier called Thwaites Glacier (larger than the State of Pennsylvania or the entire island of Great Britain), and implications of the melting of Thwaites Glacier for the planet, which could cause global seas to rise 10 feet (3 meters) placing the homes of millions, if not billions, of people underwater. That’s ten feet of sea level rise from only one melting glacier. Think about that.
A week or so after Mooney’s article, yet another appeared in the New York Times. This one announced: “Antarctica Sets Record High Temperature: 64.9°F (18.3°C).” We’ve been hearing about rising temperatures in Antarctica for a while now, so this was not such a surprise. What I noticed immediately however, was the picture that accompanied the article, showing a series of building structures of the Argentine research station on Antarctica at the locality of Esperanza (Esperanza, ironically, means hope in Spanish). The buildings were on barren land. The snow and ice are gone.8
Articles like this kept popping up day after day, week after week, and month after month, delaying my manuscript for about a year. I was first aiming to publish Meltdown in 2019, when there were some, but not so many, articles in the press about melting glaciers. The topic was urgent and very appropriate at the time. My hope was to better educate society about this growing global concern, drawing attention to the
issue of global glacier melt, but also educating about why it is important, both globally and locally. Worried that policy makers were falling behind on climate action, and very concerned that the United States in particular was pulling out of key global climate agreements (like the Paris Agreement) under the Trump Administration, I felt an urgency to get the word out before it was too late.
Then COVID-19 hit. All bets were off, anything could happen. Then climate wildfires hit. And then we came to the US elections, which opened up so many different political debates on the issue of climate. At some point I had to put a marker in the sand and publish. Glaciers are still melting and you’ve probably seen dozens more articles about their melt since I went to press and the mechanics of publication played out. So here it is. Outdated or not, the issue is still of extremely troubling relevance.
Meltdown is about glaciers, specifically about glaciers melting and how the melting of glaciers like Thwaites Glacier or Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, or the Greenland Ice Sheet, or glaciers that are much closer to home such as in the Sierra Nevada of California, or in the Rocky Mountains of the United States and Canada, or in the European Alps, or the Andes Mountains of South America, or on Mount Fuji in Japan, or those in New Zealand, or in the Caucasus or in the Hindu Kush, in the Tian Shan, or the Himalayas or in the Karakorum Mountains, will actually change your life.
This book is not meant for scientists or academics, although if you are either you’ll surely read something new or interesting in these pages that might inspire you to think differently about your work and your role and responsibility in fixing our climate— because we all have a role to play. It is meant for everyday people who are curious about the world around them, concerned about all of the new information that is surfacing about climate change, and likely have never thought about the relevance of glaciers to our global and local ecosystems, even though their demise may mean a radical change of lifestyle in the immediate years to come, possibly even in our lifetime.
I provide many references to the issues I present in this book, including from intergovernmental publications—such as the climate change reports coming out of the United Nations (UN) year after year—from academic publications that most everyday people don’t read, and from streaming media sources, even from Wikipedia. I got some criticism from some academic experts after I wrote my previous book, Glaciers: The Politics of Ice, for utilizing non-academic sources in writing my book, but frankly, academic articles on glacier melt and academic information about climate change cannot keep up with the rapid advancement of reality and the pace of climate change and the impacts it is having on glaciers and communities that depend on them—and frankly, for most people, these publications are difficult to digest. Further, academic articles about glaciers and their melt don’t necessarily capture how glacier melt affects real people, their lives, their stories, and their worries. Glacier melt is affecting our lives all around the world, even if academics have not yet done a study about it and about all the ways these impacts play out for all of us.
Sometimes local media news sources are the only information we have on the symptoms of climate impacts to glaciers and to other cryosphere environments, such as permafrost (permanently frozen grounds). If we expect society to take action as a whole in response to such a dire and urgent situation, we need to write to society in
language and communicate with society in formats that people are familiar with, in ways that are understandable and accessible, and in ways that inspire attention and action. Our messages in social media may have to be reduced to 280 characters in a tweet, or to 60 seconds for a Tik Tok video, if that is what it takes to capture attention. We need to see glaciers on Instagram (please follow #glaciers) and on Tik Tok, on Snapchat or on Facebook. That’s where people scroll to get their news, to see their friends, and to relate to the world around them. If it’s not on Tik Tok, on Facebook, or feeding through Instagram, it’s likely the world as a whole is not paying attention. If glaciers are only talked about in scientific publications, there is little chance people will be moved to do something about their vulnerability and to tackle climate change as we really should.
And so, I will double down on this approach of utilizing a variety of academic and non-academic sources for the information I convey in this new book. My intention is not to produce an academic publication, it is to produce a collection of information about melting glaciers that is digestible and that is useful for everyday people to understand how our climate is changing, and what this means for one of the planet’s most important and most vulnerable natural resources: glaciers. And how the melting of glaciers will alter our habitat, our environment, our access to natural resources, and our lifestyles, forever. In fact, this is already happening.
Meltdown is meant to shed light on an issue that we hear about almost daily in the news: glaciers rapidly melting and their threat to the planet, to coastlines, and to society more generally. It is meant to bring to the fore this globally significant phenomenon—ignored by most people, although they may notice occasional stories in the news that they most likely do not read or relate to—and explain how it will change the way we all live. We can read academic materials about glaciers and glacier melt, but the reality is that most people (the target of this book) are not academics and won’t read the UN’s latest publication on the oceans and the cryosphere. Have you, the reader, read the Paris Agreement (I’m sure you’ve talked about it or at least mentioned it) or any of the IPCC reports on climate change? Do you even know what the acronym “IPCC” stands for or what it is?
But we do read our Instagram feeds, we scroll through Tik Tok posts, we read the news through our Twitter and Facebook accounts, and we occasionally (more often lately) read an article about the natural environment that mentions glacier vulnerability or a piece of ice bigger than a country breaking off of Antarctica. I am targeting that audience: everyday people who have a sense of the planet’s vulnerability to climate change but don’t necessarily spend their free time reading scientific journals. I certainly don’t, and I’m dealing with these issues daily!
Most have heard about the melting Arctic, or have seen the famous image of a polar bear clinging on to an iceberg for lack of footing in the northern frozen oceans of our planet. Or they have heard that big pieces of ice the size of Texas, or France, or Europe, in the Antarctic region (the South Pole) are crumbling to the sea. But do we really know what this really means for our daily lives? Probably not. I’m hoping to take at least one step to change that with Meltdown.
For those curious people, Meltdown is for you, because I promise you that glacier melt will change your life in ways that you could not imagine! You may not even
realize that glacier melt is already happening and that it is already affecting you, but it is. I predict that you will start to see and recognize those changes during your lifetime. You are actually already seeing them, you just need to open your eyes and connect the dots.
Glaciers are melting because of climate change. That’s an indisputable fact that is free from political ideology. It is a fact that is independent of whether or not you believe that people are causing climate change or not. In the end, it really doesn’t matter if you believe that people cause climate change, the fact is that climate change is happening, and either way, glaciers are melting and this will mean radical change for all of us, including you.
Glaciers melt away and reappear on the Earth cyclically, due to natural as well as external factors, such as a large meteor that might hit the Earth and darken the sky for long periods of time, or volcanic eruptions that can also abruptly change and destabilize our climate in ways that could impact glaciers.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, Antarctica was largely ice free, while now it has layers of ice thousands of meters thick. Now Antarctica’s ice is melting, because the climate of the Earth is changing. One day, maybe not too far off in the future, Antarctica will again be ice free. Glaciers come and go because of the Earth’s constantly changing position in its oscillating orbit and the changing pattern of that orbit around the sun. These external and natural phenomena bring on and phase out our cyclical ice ages. We can argue as to whether or not unnatural phenomena like human activity can cause global climate changes that melt away glaciers, but again, the reality is that glaciers are melting and this is now more obvious than ever before. The question really is how this will change our lives and how we can address glacier melt and maybe slow it down to avoid the most severe impacts that it will bring. We must understand how it may make life difficult or even unlivable for certain segments of the population and whether or not we can stop it or at least slow the rate of melt before it’s too late. As a very last resort, we should better understand the impacts of glacier melt so that we can better adapt to our climate as well as help others adapt who do not have the means or capacity to do so.
As far as natural Earth climate cycles are concerned, we are currently at the end of an ice age, which means much of the glacier presence on the Earth (compared to a full on ice age) has already dwindled from what it was 10,000 or 20,000 years ago. In the future, probably many millennia from now, vast areas of the Earth will once again be covered by ice, and the Earth will be much colder than it is today. For the moment, it is warming at an unprecedented rate in modern human history. That news bit from Antarctica about it reaching 65°F (18°C) is alarming. It is a record-setting temperature in a part of the world that should be cold, but suddenly, is not.
The issue of anthropogenic climate change (human-induced climate change) is certainly on the forefront of global political discussion and tension. It has even spilled over to dinner table discussions. This is so because we are seeing the instability of climate-related events growing in frequency. Unusually hot days in cold places—like that recent record high temperature in Antarctica—are becoming the norm. The recent fires we saw burn in places like Australia and California and the record-breaking temperatures of 130°F (54°C) in parts of the American West are indicators that
something is out of sync. Scientific opinion has already converged on the idea that humans as opposed to natural phenomena are indeed impacting and changing the Earth’s planetary climate. Some refer to this era we are living as the Anthropocene, an era where humans, as opposed to Nature, define our geological times.
Whether or not you, the reader, believe that people are causing climate change to accelerate, the fact is, we are losing our glaciers to a warming environment: glacier demise is not only real, it is also critically important to all of us. I accept the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, but at the end of the day, for you, the reader, it doesn’t really matter whether you do or do not. Nor am I writing this book to convince you that we are the cause of climate change. I am writing this book to draw attention to the risks of continued rapid glacier melt and to send out a warning and signal that we must act now, individually (that’s you) and collectively (our governments, our companies, and our societies). If rapid glacier melt continues at the current pace, which seems likely, we’re in trouble, as we will see drastic and catastrophic changes to our global ecosystems. In fact, we are already seeing these changes starting to happen.
We are in a position to do something about climate change, if we set ourselves to this task. Our power to change the global climate became evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. We cleaned the planet’s air in mere weeks. Cleaning the air, for instance, is of enormous help in saving glaciers. We can do it again, and we can do more. We can make the changes we need to make. If we don’t the consequences will be severe.
Meltdown is about the impacts of glacier melt to our planetary environment.
To properly understand the role glaciers play in our global ecosystem and realize the significance of their demise, we need to understand glaciers, which for the most part, few people do. Once we see and understand their majestic beauty and the critical role they play in keeping our climate stable, we can begin to explore ways to help conserve their delicate ecosystems, necessary for their healthy survival and sustainability. Knowing how melting glaciers are impacting our Earth, and how their demise will further impact our planet, is also important for us to prepare for change, not only for our living generation, but for generations to come.
We should also consider that the disappearance of our glaciers would impose severe limitations on our natural ecosystems, and so it is important to understand glaciers’ functions and dynamics so that we not only protect them, but adjust our environments to their absence. In some places where glaciers have already dwindled or disappeared, or where water is becoming ever scarcer, some people have already begun to study how natural glaciers function and are taking action to generate artificial glacier dynamics by mimicking and recreating glacier ecosystems (I call them glaciosystems) where artificial glaciers can form and thrive, and in so doing, recreating their cooling and water conservation and production capacity. Yes, people are “making” artificial glaciers as natural glaciers melt!
Our Earth’s climate can provide, for many more generations, and even for millennia, a comfortable human existence with livable ecosystems. However, if our glaciers melt away, those ecosystems will surely undergo major change, and become unable to sustain human life, or at least a version of life that we find appealing.
For this reason, Meltdown: The Earth Without Glaciers should be a book that is of interest to everyone, independent of their political ideology or their position on climate change.
I invite you to explore these pages, and hopefully, like me, you will be inspired to visit a glacier, and maybe even do something to help their survival. Maybe you already are!
JDT
Acknowledgments
Glaciers have changed my life. I didn’t study glaciers at the universities I attended. I didn’t even seek them out. But they were there, waiting. As I look back at my own glacial history, I think they came to me.
Back when I learned that a mining company was dynamiting glaciers to get at gold, I felt an urgency to learn everything that I could about glaciers, and so I did, and in order to do that I reached out to glaciologists all over the world. And they answered. Without their help, I wouldn’t have been able to inventory thousands of glaciers that are at direct risk from industrial activity, or understand the mining impacts to glaciers, or come up with terms like “the glaciosystem” (something I defined to identify the specific glacier-ecosystem and the environmental characteristics necessary in order to protect them and make them thrive). It is to those glaciologists and geocryologists, who opened their minds and their hearts to this crazy environmentalist who didn’t seem to care that saving glaciers sometimes seems like fighting windmills, that I am indebted.
In my last book, Glaciers: The Politics of Ice, I first thanked my Chilean friends who started a global movement to protect glaciers from mining impacts. We all owe you gratitude for waking us up to what was happening high up at thousands of feet of elevation in the Central Andes. Our first battle was against Barrick Gold and its illdesigned Pascua Lama gold mining project: that was the company that was dynamiting glaciers. A very long fight ensued to stop Pascua Lama. It wasn’t only my fight, but that of hundreds and even thousands of people who understood that water was more valuable than gold and that it was profoundly wrong to dynamite glaciers. We took the side of the glaciers, arguing that placing a mega mining project in the middle of glacier terrain was crazy. But the miners called us crazy, they called us alarmists. In the end, and coincidently in the very year 2020 when this manuscript was completed, the Pascua Lama project was ordered permanently closed by Chile’s Environmental Tribunal, precisely because of all of the “crazy” things we had been saying about glacier impacts and contamination—as it turned out, we were right. So thank you Leopoldo Sanchez Grunert, Rosana Bórquez, Sara Larrain, Rodrigo Polanco, Juan Carlos Urquidi, and Antonio Horvath in Chile who were the spearheads of the glacier protection movement, laying out the first proposal ever to come up with a glacier protection law. That law would die in Chile’s Congress, but it lives on in so many other ways. Many would follow your lead, but you were the first! Thank you!
Special mention also goes to Marta Maffei, the mother of Argentina’s national glacier protection law, along with her legal advisor Andrea Borucua of ECOSUR. Their contribution to glaciology and to the protection of glaciers around the world has been paramount and will survive for many generations to come. They hand-carried the failed Chilean glacier protection bill across the Andes and submitted it to Argentina’s Congress, and it worked. I contacted Marta recently to congratulate her on the 10-year
anniversary of the passage of the law. We’ve had to fight an ongoing battle against those working to weaken it or eliminate it, but the law is still holding strong. Thank you!
I am personally indebted to a handful of glaciologists who helped me learn about ice, about glaciers, about glaciosystems, and even about invisible glaciers. I may have not gone to a university to learn about glaciers, but grit, reading, walks on glaciers, many hours on Google Earth finding glaciers and rock glaciers that you helped me see for the first time, and long conversations with you guys made it happen. Thank you!
Cedomir Marangunic (Geoestudios, of Chile), Juan Carlos Leiva (IANIGLA, of Argentina), Benjamín Morales Arnao (Patronato de las Montañas Andinas, of Peru), and Bernard Francou (IRD, of France) were my personal and virtual instructors in the first course I ever took on glaciology organized by the UN’s Environmental Program (UNEP) in Chile. I have kept in touch with them over the years and each time I have a question to answer, they oblige, sometimes with very lengthy emails.
Cedomir (Chedo to his friends) always has unique insight into the world of those enigmatic rock glaciers. Juan Carlos has inundated me with academic material, research papers, and studies. Benjamín has provided inspiration from Peru, where after decades of work to avoid glacier tsunamis in the Cordillera Blanca Mountains he is showing us that we can still do much to protect our glaciers and our communities. And then there’s Bernard with whom I spent long coffee breaks and dinner hours during various glacier courses and on our visit to several glaciers in Ecuador and Chile. Bernard has shared his deep and first-hand knowledge of the receding glaciers of the Tropical Andes. Together we came up with the idea of a new term, cryoactivism, that is, activism to protect glaciers. Thank you!
I am especially in debt to three expert glaciologists and more specifically, geocryologists (those who study glaciers, ice, rocks, and their relationship) whose direct contribution to my work has been paramount: Juan Pablo Milana, Alexander Brenning, and Mateo Martini. They stuck their necks out and agreed to review my publications, signing their names to my glacier inventories as academic and professional reviewers of my work, when many others would not dare to have their name associated with me, one of the crazy environmental activists. Academics rarely walk across that bridge, and they did, for the betterment of society and of our planet. Juan Pablo is perhaps one of the most knowledgeable specialists of the periglacial environment, having spent the better portion of his career among the rock glaciers and frozen grounds of the Central Andes. Alexander Brenning deserves a fair share of gratitude (from everyone who cares about glacier protection) as he was one of the first (if not the first) brave souls in the academic glacier world to question and reveal mining impacts to glaciers. Glaciologists simply didn’t do that. Those that studied mining impacts to glaciers were working for the mining companies, and if they did come out and publicly recognize the impact, they wouldn’t get work. I remember when I did my first rock glacier inventory, I cold-called Alex in Canada, where he lived and worked at the time, and pleaded him to review my inventory and to teach me how to identify rock glaciers and other permafrost features on Google Earth. Thousands of rocks glaciers inventoried later, Alex is to thank. Mateo Martini, Doctor in Geological Studies of the University of Cordoba, Argentina, also contributed his time and his good name to undersigning my work. Without him, I would have never been able to legitimize
much of the material to protect glaciers from mining impacts that I have produced over the years. Thank you!
I must recognize the folks at the IANIGLA, Argentina’s Snow and Glacier Institute, particularly the contribution of Dario Trombotto, one of the world’s most knowledgeable geo-cryologists and periglacial environment specialists. Dario also has offered his broad knowledge, freely, openly, and has patiently answered many questions about the dynamics of rock glaciers and permafrost and has shared much of his work, publications, pictures, and other materials that have been critical to my work and research. We are all indebted to Dario as one of the co-authors of the very first glacier bill drafted and eventually enacted into law and for having wisely included rock glaciers and the periglacial environment as protected resources in that bill. Ricardo Villalba, then Director of the IANIGLA, also contributed to ensuring the political support necessary to sustain the law and fight back against a presidential veto that undermined it. Thank you!
Thanks go also to Stephan Gruber, of the University of Zurich, who shared his permafrost zoning map tool with me and with whom I’ve had several communications over the years to discuss the particularities of his unparalleled tool for finding frozen grounds around the planet. Thank you!
I would also like to thank some of the key cryoactivists (you may not consider yourselves cryoactivists, but you are) who helped with the content of Meltdown, through interviews, through your own research and publications, and by answering many inquiries that I sent around. A shout out to John Englander, author of High Tide on Main Street (2012) and Moving to Higher Ground (2021) whom I met in Delray, Florida, not too long ago. We discussed approaches to climate change communication, something that seems to be simple to convey, but always falls short of achieving the action needed to revert our climate emergency. Thanks to Henry Fountain who I met to discuss his climate beat at the New York Times and his work on bringing global attention to glacier vulnerability. Your work is inspiring. Thank you!
I want to thank Jared Blumenfeld, currently head of California’s Environmental Protection Agency. He’s had pretty important job titles before, but what I take away from his friendship over the years is his ability to boldly lead, to take steps that really make a difference when others fear standing up for what may be hard but is also the right thing to do, like when he was San Francisco’s Environment Director and made it the first city ever to ban plastic bags outright. That is merely one example of the many politically challenging actions he has taken and he keeps taking to fix our planet. Just as this book went to press, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, along with Jared and Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board, announced a ban on the production of external combustion engines in automobiles and trucks manufactured in California by 2035 and 2045, respectively. That’s what I mean by bold! Not many will throw down the gauntlet in that way! I encourage you to listen to Jared’s Podship Earth environmental podcasts, which are always unique and inspiring. One of these we did together and is about rock glaciers! Thank you Jared!
Thank you to Connie Millar, David Herbst, and Adam Riffle, who accompanied me and Jared on our trek to study the Sierra Nevada rock glaciers, those invisible subsurface glaciers that will survive when all of the other glaciers melt away. Connie is a
fabulous human being who has devoted her life and heart to study the high mountain environments of the Sierra Nevada. Her work is inspirational. Thank you! David is a biologist who also has been a life-long activist, helping save Mono Lake and fighting for more sustainable ways to relate to our hydrology in the American West. Thank you, David! Adam helped the Center for Human Rights and Environment (CHRE) launch its Cryoactivism Program and now works in the forestry sector in Washington State. Thank you!
Special thanks goes to Durwood Zaelke, founder and CEO of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD), a small but phenomenal and globally relevant environmental climate policy organization that has single-handedly led global leaders to act on climate. Durwood has provided incisive contributions that have helped steer the world toward some of the most critical and necessary policies and actions taken to date (and still to be taken) to contain and hopefully reverse climate change. Durwood’s tireless energy and his unwavering commitment to stopping climate change is contagious and provides all of us a beacon of hope to help guide us and offer us the reassurance that through human ingenuity, passion and hard work, we will get the job done. To this day I receive emails from Durwood at late hours of the night or just before dawn as he works tirelessly to help mend our planet. I am indebted to Durwood for many reasons, but perhaps the most important one is that he believed in me and in us (at CHRE) when our nonprofit environmental and human rights organization was only an idea written on the back of an envelope in 1998. His unselfish support and his friendship along the way gave us the courage and the inspiration to do the impossible. Thank you!
To Gabrielle Dreyfus, or Gabby (the ice-cubologist as her dad called her), who showed up at the very end of this project and offered fascinating discussion about the possible onset of a new ice age, about Snowball Earth or Hothouse Earth theories that suggest we may have missed the onramp to the next ice age. Our latest discussion was about how the actual switching of the Earth’s poles might radically change our climate. I don’t know if we’ve gotten any closer to figuring out when the next ice age will come, but I truly enjoyed our nerdy ice age conversations about Milankovitch Cycles. Who else would enjoy that??? Thank you!
A young woman from Nantucket, Amelia Murphy, showed up one day online to offer her help to edit, correct, and research different sections of Meltdown. You know all of the work you’ve done to make this happen. More importantly however, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, we wrote an article together, which is included here as Chapter 10, to look at how the world responded to COVID-19, and why we’re not responding the same way to climate change. I am 53 and she’s 21, not much older than my daughter. I was blown away by her wisdom, her freshness, and her uncanny ability to take new information and run with it. Whether she is researching the vulnerability of the Antarctic ice sheet or studying policy to reduce the urban heat island effect in Stockton, California, she comes through with marvelous content and analysis. She’s still helping me edit this book (well now it’s off to print, so she’s done) but we are now working together to advance climate policy and environmental justice in California and around the world. Amelia, thank you!
Much appreciation to my editor, Jeremy Lewis, and assistant editor, Bronwyn Geyer, of Oxford University Press, who understood the value of tackling the issue of melting glaciers and have strongly supported my work. They have made this second book come together seamlessly. A shoutout also goes to Mark Carey of the University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers. Mark introduced me to Oxford University Press before I wrote Glaciers: The Politics of Ice. This book would not exist had that introduction not occurred. I also cannot leave out the copyeditor who showed up for me (but not for you) in the “track changes” version of the manuscript: Bríd Nowlan. She read every word carefully, checked footnotes and acronyms, and made those many detailed grammatical corrections and stylistic changes that make everything for you, the reader, so much smoother. Another invisible but crucial person, James Fraleigh, the final cut proofreader, made the very last detailed checks, catching persistent typos and inconsistencies. Thank you both! Finally, special thanks to the editorial team led by Project Manager Ponneelan Moorthy and Production Editor Leslie Johnson. Ponneelan and Leslie kept everything on track and handled communication with me and between the various team members. Thank you!
Finally, my family. Angelina, Ulises, and my wife Romina, who are fed up with me always talking about glaciers. When we sit down to plan out family vacations, they always know what’s coming. The last time we went to Alaska, and now, Colorado, of course, to visit glaciers. In Alaska, I dropped my wife down into a glacier moulin, and somehow she got out okay, and frankly I’m glad she did. On that family vacation, I had to mix things up a bit for them; the whole two-week trip was a surprise; they found out each day which glacier we were visiting. Ice-climbing, glacier traversing, moulin drops, canoeing by glaciers, or seeing them from the glacier train, it was an awesome trip! I am so glad I am part of my family. Thank you!
Jorge Daniel Taillant
Introduction
[If you have an Instagram account, follow #glacier and enjoy incredible glacier images while you read this book.]
The day I discovered that a mining company wanted to dynamite three glaciers to get at the gold beneath, I became a cryoactivist.
At the time, I didn’t know what a cryoactivist was. In fact the words cryoactivist and cryoactivism1 hadn’t even been invented yet. They would be. I wasn’t sure exactly why a mining company would want to put dynamite to ice, but it sounded profoundly wrong to me (and it was). That’s where it all began and as time went on, my urge to protect glaciers and everything about them only became stronger.
As I jumped into all things related to glaciers, I discovered a world that was completely esoteric to me and realized that the same was true for most people going about their daily lives. I hadn’t really ever thought about the importance of glaciers to our planet’s environment, nor how their presence (or lack thereof) determines how, where, and if we can live on Earth.
Our Earth’s surface comes in one of three varieties: water, land, or ice. The percentages are, respectively, 71%, 19%, and 10%. Now consider this. Of all of the water on Earth (including ocean water, rivers, lakes, and water contained in ice), only 2% is freshwater (that means that only 2% of the water on Earth is drinkable). The rest is in the oceans and is too salty to use, unless you spend lots of money and energy to desalinate it. Of that critical but minuscule amount (the 2%) of freshwater available for us to do things like drink, cook, bathe, flush toilets, wash dishes, water plants, irrigate farms, run industries, etc., an astounding 75% is in ice, glacier ice to be precise, most of it packed away in sheets of ice tens of thousands of feet (thousands of meters) thick at our polar extremes. Conclusion: most of our freshwater is in glaciers.
A significant portion of the water we use for drinking, however, is stored in glaciers found in high altitude mountain environments, like the Sierra Nevada of California or along the Rocky Mountains, in the Alps of Europe, in the Andes of South America, or in the Himalayas in Central Asia. The glaciers up in these, and in many other high mountain environments around the world, are rivers of ice flowing down the coldest mountaintops of the planet. Glaciers are where most of the Earth’s stored freshwater is conveniently packaged away, ready for use when we need it most. The more I read and the more I delved into the world of glaciers, the more I discovered that glaciers were a critical part of our ecosystem, despite the fact that we knew (and that I knew) very little about them.
As I fell into the cryosphere (the Earth’s frozen environment), I discovered unexpected things related to glaciers that completely startled me. This new information about this obscure ice located in remote places of the world took me to entirely new levels of awareness about my environment. Ironically, while glaciers account for about 10% of the planet’s surface area,2 most people have never seen a glacier. Most people have seen lakes, rivers or streams, mountains, the sea, the plains, and forests, but have
you seen a glacier? Probably not. Most people around the world drink glacier meltwater, but are likely unaware that the water they drink is at least partially derived from a glacier. They also ignore the fact that if glaciers disappear (and they are disappearing), many communities may no longer have access to freshwater in their local environments.
As I read more and more about glaciers—collecting books, pamphlets, and academic papers—watched documentaries about the cryosphere, and visited glaciers and their surroundings, I learned that you can travel in time through glacier ice and breath air that existed over a hundred thousand years ago, even close to a million years ago. Glaciers are a remarkable natural safe-deposit box of our planetary history.
I also learned that some glaciers, because of their massive size and instability, can cause ferocious tsunamis that can abruptly and without warning kill thousands of people and flatten entire towns. I learned that glaciers are like black holes that devour things coming too close to their gravitational energy, trapping and preserving prehistoric creatures, swallowing up entire airplanes, and burying mysteries for generations and generations, even for millennia. I learned for instance that some ice in our cryosphere, incredibly, is flammable. Yes, ice can catch on fire! In fact, there is more methane gas in permafrost (ice in frozen grounds) than in all of the rest of globally available fossil fuel reserves combined! Who would have thought that ice contained fossil fuels! I surely didn’t.
I read about armies that decided to bomb glaciers with attack planes fearing that they might take over communities as they advanced over land—not surprisingly, the bombs made no visible impact on the impervious glacier that simply went about its normal flow of affairs. I even discovered that some glaciers are invisible that’s right, you can’t see them, until someone shows you where and how to look at the Earth, and then, by the art of magic, colossally large glaciers appear right before your eyes where before there was nothing but earth and stone! It never fails, each time I find one of these magnificent invisible glaciers on a mountain I am blown away. You will learn to find these invisible glaciers by reading this book, and I assure you, you will have the same exciting feeling of discovery each time you locate one!
Curiously, when I started trying to educate myself about glaciers, I found it both remarkable and frustrating that there is no college degree in glaciology per se. You may have heard of glaciologists, but actually, they too, like glaciers, are an intangible enigmatic bunch. Formally, glaciologists don’t really exist, that is, they are instead geologists, geographers, or hydrologists, or like me, a new variety of glaciologist, they can also be political scientists, drawn by the majestic beauty of the cryosphere and the conviction that through public policy, we should be aware of and protect this delicate natural resource. Anyone, from nearly any field, can be, if they so desire, a glaciologist, and study the relationship of our icy eco-friends to their field. There are even anthropologists that develop expertise in the relationship between people and glaciers.
As a career environmental policy expert (not necessarily a glacier specialist), I thought I knew about our global hydrological resources. In fact, two decades ago, I was part of a fairly small number of environmental and human rights activists trying to convince global governance institutions like the UN that people had a “right to water.” What I didn’t realize then was that glaciers hold most of our freshwater!
And they play a critical role in how our global freshwater supply gets fed into the environment.
Here I was, fighting for the right to water, globally, and before some of the world’s most important human rights agencies, but ultimately, without glaciers the right to water would be practically unattainable! There was a gap there that I needed to fill. For that reason, and urged on by my good friend John Bonine, an environmental law professor at the University of Oregon, and founder of the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW), I eventually wrote a paper that was published in an environmental law journal, positing the importance of establishing “the human right . to glaciers?”3 It was at a symposium at the University of Oregon, to honor John’s late wife Svitlana Kravchenko, a bold human rights activist, that I met Mark Carey, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers, who introduced me to my publisher.
I would also discover a special breed of glaciers, special because they are in fact invisible. I’d like to take a moment to explain this incredible phenomenon which most people, even many glaciologists, know little or nothing about. As I have said, most people are fairly impervious to glaciers, and figuratively we might say that glaciers are invisible to the greater population, but there are glaciers that in fact actually are invisible.
These “invisible” glaciers exist beneath the surface of the Earth, in places we would never imagine they might. These are glaciers that you can’t see until someone tells you where to look for them, and then, suddenly, as if a curtain is pulled away from Nature, we begin to find ice where before the only thing we saw were rocks.
In California for example, the Sierra Nevada has nearly lost all of its many hundreds of visible surface glaciers, and yet, there are over a thousand invisible subsurface rock glaciers4 (follow #rockglacier on Instagram to see some amazing photos of these frozen beasts) that few Californians know anything about. Some of these subsurface glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and up to a mile or more wide and long. They are rivers of thick solid ice, beneath the surface of the Earth, displaying many of the same properties of visible white surface glaciers, such as the fact that they slither down mountainsides.5
Accompanied by rock glacier specialist Connie Millar, a paleo-ecologist, and Jared Blumenfeld, head of California’s Environmental Protection Agency, I organized a scoping exercise of some of these magnificent cryospheric reserves, which, unbeknown to most Californians, are critical to the state’s water supply. You can listen to a short podcast about this wonderful trip we did to the top of the Sierra Nevada at Jared’s Podship Earth podcast series.
In the world of glaciology, these subsurface rock glaciers form part of what is called the “periglacial environment,” which includes permafrost (or permanently frozen grounds) rich in ice and water. These subterranean ice reserves in a drought-stricken area like California or the northern Central Andes, for instance, provide critical water supply year round to the communities and ecosystems below them, and yet, residents in these regions generally are oblivious to the existence and much less to the hydrological dynamics and importance of this water resource. Even the most seasoned environmentalists rarely know of the existence of this critical water supply found in rock glaciers and other elements of the periglacial (permafrost) environment.
