WIRED

TALKING ICE I MANASSEH FRANKLIN

On screen, the calving appears to begin collecting time-lapse photos across four glaci- had captured the ’s decline as it steadily in slow motion. First, start crumbling ated regions in three countries, the film offers shriveled into the mountain . along the surface of the glacier, which seconds something else: a visual story line of loss We pulled the canoe into a slippery crack prior had appeared still and calm. Large staggering in its sheer magnitude and over- in glacier-smoothed stone, and we scrambled chunks plummet into the water and roll over whelming in its undeniable reality. On screen, out. The camera box sat perched on a tall to expose the cobalt blue of centuries-old ice. appear like living creatures: powerful monopod: four cables stretched from the box A chain reaction spreads as the rumbling and yet simultaneously fragile and mutable. The into bolts embedded in the rock. Matthew crashing disrupts adjacent masses. Suddenly, a images give audiences a sense of proximity to procured a tool kit from his pack and opened mile-long swath, with seracs more than twice the urgency of vanishing ice in a startling and the weatherproof, tamperproof box. He pulled the size of most skyscrapers, buckles and crum- awe-striking way. out the camera, turned it on and began to page bles into the ocean. Two years after the documentary through the photos. This scene of a dramatic calving event on premiered, I sat in the middle of a silver “The card’s full,” he reported. “And it looks Greenland’s Ilulissat Glacier, also known as aluminum canoe on Mendenhall Lake at the like we lost a couple of months.” Sermeq Kujalleq, appears in the 2012 docu- mouth of the Mendenhall Glacier (Sitaanta- I peered over his shoulder at the view- mentary Chasing Ice—a film that helped bring agu) near Juneau, Alaska. At the bow and the finder. His thumb tapped the button rapid- the seriousness of climate change into wide- stern were Matthew Kennedy and his assistant fire. Hundreds of images streamed past, most spread public consciousness. Chasing Ice won Drew Fink, two members of the Extreme Ice of them clouded with condensation. an Emmy and was shown across all seven conti- Survey. Waterproof stuff sacks of camera gear But slowly the pictures became clearer: the nents and in more than 172 countries. Posted filled the space between us. Light rain misted Mendenhall’s fractured front lit by pink dawn; on YouTube in 2012, the clip I just described on our jackets. ice glinting in bright midday sun; seracs gleam- has since acquired more than 58 million views, At the edge of the glacier, we paddled past ing in golden evening and then turning shad- and that’s merely on one channel. glossy, blue-tinted icebergs toward the north- owy in dusk, their edges faintly outlined in Chasing Ice follows the underfunded east side of the lake, where a large rock slab darkness. The face of the glacier stark, cold, origins of the Extreme Ice Survey—a photo- bulged out of the cliff face. We were heading its cracks concealed by snow. Ice on the lake graphic art and science organization—and for a station where a camera had been snap- broken up. Icebergs dotting still water. showcases the passion of the founder James ping photos every day over the past seven I shivered, watching a year of the glacier’s Balog. But as its focus turns to the cameras years. As of 2014, more than 90,000 images life play out before my eyes.

103 My first encounter with glacial ice occurred We woke to a hot sun, and we made a slip- around wide and skied over narrow on a late June day in Alaska a year before. I was pery, loose traverse over eroding to the ones. In the middle of a crack roughly two feet visiting a good friend on the Kenai Peninsula edge of the ice. When our crampons finally across, I paused, my ski tips on one side, their who asked if I wanted to ski on a glacier in crunched the pebble-studded surface, we stuffed tails on the other. I glanced down. summer. This was my first trip to Alaska, and sunscreen up our nostrils. Keep your mouths Two electric blue walls plunged into a black I jumped at the proposition. closed, Helen’s friend warned, lest we burn the crease. My stomach fluttered with sudden Prior to that journey, the most I knew roofs of them while panting in the heat. awareness of the abyss beneath me, my thin about glaciers was that they were melting. Al Some Alaskans call this glacier The Woz, skis the only thing between me and that empty Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had hit theaters which gives the place a musical, magical reso- space. What is down there? I wondered. What is when I was in college. Shortly afterward, polar nance with the Land of Oz. It is a gateway to this strange world we’ve come to? bears became listed as a “threatened species” under the US Endangered Species Act. Photo- graphed on thawing icebergs, the bears quickly became a tragic poster image of global warm- ing. But such pictures seemed far away from my everyday life. I grew up in Pennsylvania, a state in which glaciers have been extinct for some 20,000 years. Later, I moved to Colo- rado, where many of the glaciers that remain in shaded alpine zones could easily be mistaken for perennial snow patches. As a climber and ski mountaineer in the central Rockies, I encountered other remnants—granite amphi- theaters, u-shaped valleys, house-sized boulders strewn along valley edges and floors—though I didn’t always recognize these landscape features as traces that long-vanished glaciers had left behind. Instead, I saw glacial erratics, such as those strewn about Independence Pass, as perfect problem cubes for a day of roadside bouldering. Lofty , high in the Elk Mountains, lent delightfully steep ski lines in stable spring snow. Once, during a climbing trip in Alberta, I paddled the milky glacial melt of Maligne Lake and hiked along the ragged edges of the Brazeau Icefield. Even then, as my fingertips [Opening Page] Drew Fink gazes at the ceiling of the Mendenhall ice cave. Weeks later, the Anchorage Daily News report- skimmed the meltwater and crumbled moraine ed its collapse. l [This Page] Matthew Kennedy on the Mendenhall Glacier (Sitaantaagu). As it shrinks, bedrock appears, as well as remnants of old forests that the glacier had plowed over during the Little Ice Age. Manasseh Franklin (both) dusted my boots, the glaciers seemed to me like ornamental pieces of landscape, far from the world of human consumption and envi- the Harding Icefield, a -lined portal to a We made camp on a rock island embed- ronmental destruction. The Glaciers Are Shrink- remote, icy and mysterious world. With our ded in the glacier. As the evening light kalei- ing, headlines read, but I didn’t know what that sights set on a base camp partway up the glacier, doscoped across a jumble of seracs, the Woz phrase really meant for landscapes, ecosystems, we moved peacefully that day, enchanted by appeared fully unique and alive—a far cry climate or even humans. The words were the surroundings despite our shoulder-bruis- from impersonal headlines. Why was it that hollow for me until I visited Alaska. ing, eighty-pound packs. The sun’s electric each time I’d seen the word glacier in the news In June 2013, the bush plane skidded rays stirred wavy mirages above the ice. As we I’d felt so disconnected before? across a silty lake amid the emerald valley sides continued up a broad, gentle incline, constant of the Kenai Peninsula. Two friends and I made gurgles and hisses rose from the glacier’s surface, Since I started paying attention to news cover- camp on the gravel shore that night, and I fell filling the air with a kind of melody. At a blue age of melting glaciers and climate change, I asleep to the sound of mosquitoes bouncing meltwater channel, we paused, hands cupped, encountered recurring patterns of shock and off the tent walls. Upstream, the thick ice of to bring the icy water to our hot lips. fear. More often than not, reports focus on what a glacier groaned as it shifted. Occasionally By midday, we reached the snow line, we have already lost, and what more we have left pieces cracked off and splashed into a steady where we switched from crampons to skis. My to lose: “A Glacier Disappears in Alaska” (The stream of glacial melt that funneled into the skins stuck like Velcro on snow that had turned Atlantic); “Glaciers are Retreating. Millions nearby lake. tacky beneath the cloudless sky. We zigzagged Rely on Their Water” (The New York Times);

104 “Human society under urgent threat from The options for action can seem minuscule coming, and begin to rethink what it means loss of Earth’s natural life,” (The Guardian). compared to the magnitude of the problem. Yes, to have hope.” The headlines ring like alarm bells: something we can recycle, drive less, install solar panels on Franzen’s essay prompted fervent backlash terrible is happening and if we don’t take action our houses, vote for more ecologically friendly from scientists and journalists alike. Many of now, the consequences will be catastrophic. legislation, but still, Antarctic ice shelves are these writers shared a sense of the severity of Scientific studies corroborate these warn- snapping off and drifting out to sea, Australia the climate crisis, but they expressed concerns ings. Earth’s glaciers store approximately 70 is being devastated by massive wildfires. In the that an increase in despair could further derail percent of the planet’s freshwater. Not only United States, our current president has scoffed efforts to mitigate the impact—to try to dimin- does the release of that water cause sea levels at the idea of taking part in actions necessary ish the extent of environmental impact and to rise, but broad swaths of white ice also to decrease climate change. Instead, as of Janu- human suffering. Nonetheless, we live in an era in which the very value and definition of hope have become contested. In a 2018 New “Hope is an embrace of the Yorker essay, “How to Write about a Vanish- ing World,” environmental journalist Eliza- beth Kolbert explained: “Hope and its doleful unknown and the unknowable, twin, Hopelessness, might be thought of as the co-muses of the modern eco-narrative. Such is an alternative to the certainty of the world we’ve created—a world of wounds— that loss is, almost invariably, the nature writ- both optimists and pessimists. er’s subject. The question is how we relate to that loss. Is the glass ninety-five per cent empty Optimists think it will all be or is it five per cent full?” Prompted by my 2013 trip to the Woz, I fine without our involvement; spent the following years at the University of Wyoming, writing about glaciers for a master of fine arts in creative nonfiction and in envi- pessimists adopt the opposite ronment and natural resources. I also began working on a nonfiction book that combined position; both excuse themselves narratives of experiential travel and science, hoping to help expand public understanding from acting.”—Rebecca beyond the news headlines. I traveled across the Columbia Icefield in Canada, photo- graphed kinked meltwater channels on the Solnit, Hope in the Dark Exit Glacier in Alaska, joined a community college research group on an expedition to work as a climate regulator. When ice sheets ary 2020, his administration has headed in the the Dinwoody Glacier in Wyoming, replaced diminish, a negative feedback loop ensues: opposite direction: withdrawing the US from camera memory cards with the Extreme Ice rising temperatures cause more ice to thaw, the Paris climate accord, promoting fossil fuel Survey and returned to the Woz. which causes more warming, more melting, development, cutting funding for renewable In each of these places, I encountered and so on. Pumped into the atmosphere by energy, lowering standards for air pollution and vibrant ecosystems and astounding beauty, the combustion of fossil fuels, CO₂ molecules energy efficiency, and trying to suppress scien- but also an inescapable awareness that my help trap the hotter air. The effects can devas- tific evidence of the reality of the problems. own actions helped threaten them. I had, after tate ecosystems: salmon die in waters that have In light of such ominous circumstances, all, flown on planes and driven my truck long grown too warm; wolverines dwindle without some members of the media have all but given distances to get there. Torn between a sense the snow they need to survive; the pack ice up. In a September 2019 New Yorker editorial, of awe at glacial landscapes and disgust with that polar bears depend on for hunting dimin- “What If We Stopped Pretending?”, novelist the role of many societies (including my own) ishes, and they become cut off from their Jonathan Franzen posited that humans should in destroying them, I eventually had to stop. food supply. Though humans are outstand- stop imagining that we can still stop wide- I shelved the book manuscript as my own ing models of adaptability, we are not omitted spread climate change. “If you care about the mental state sunk into depression. from this equation. Rising sea levels, wide- planet, and about the people and animals who There is a term for the feelings of utter spread drought, forest fires and other natural live on it, there are two ways to think about hopelessness I encountered: “ecoanxiety.” disasters can result in the loss of homes and [climate change],” he wrote. “You can keep on Though not an official clinical diagnosis, livelihoods, displace entire communities and hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ecoanxiety recalls other phrases for psycho- threaten the future of human societies. ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s logical responses to the climate crisis, such as Given the facts, it’s easy to feel disconsolate. inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is “climate distress,” “climate grief” and “climate

105 anxiety.” According to a 2017 report from the American Psychological Association (APA), ecoanxiety can manifest as an “unrelenting day- by-day despair that can be experienced during a drought” or that can develop from “watch- ing the slow and seemingly irrevocable impacts of climate change unfold, and worrying about the future for oneself, children, and later gener- ations.” While acute disorders can result from traumatic climate-related disasters, chronic disorders can arise from the “gradual impacts of climate change, like changes in weather patterns and rising sea levels.” The APA report cites “conflict avoidance, fatalism, fear, helpless- ness, and resignation” among the possible symp- toms, precisely the kinds of reactions that could stymie efforts to confront the climate crisis or to adapt to its results. Conversely, the researchers note, even relatively small attempts to address environmental problems—whether by biking to work, using public transit or conserving acces- [Artwork] Zaria Forman’s Chasing the Light, soft pastel on paper, the result of a Greenland trip that was initially her sible green spaces—can improve individual and mother’s idea. On her website, Forman wrote, “I scattered my mother’s ashes amidst the melting ice.” Courtesy Zaria Forman communal mental and physical health. I suspect my own hopelessness stemmed climate-coverage playbook, can they surmount them to shouts to hear each other over the roars from the not-uncommon feeling that any the widespread public distrust of the press and and echoes of rushing water. Matthew set up action I took wouldn’t be enough. But, taking the budget cutbacks that are ravaging news- his tripod, and Drew and I skipped over rocks. some form of action was likely what I needed rooms across the country?” Droplets fell from the ceiling, smacked cold to do to combat that despair. It’s possible that if One simple fact is that communicating against my forehead. Drew waved me over to I’d kept on with the book project, I could have effectively about something so sweeping and the wall where he was standing. He spread his channeled my ecoanxiety in a way that would consequential as climate change can be excru- fingers wide and pressed his palms into the have, ultimately, achieved some good (and ciatingly difficult. It seems to require a tangled ice. When he removed them a minute later, an perhaps I still will; I haven’t abandoned the web of disseminating accurate information; imprint of his hands remained. book completely). Heidi Hutner, the director explaining complex science to a lay audience; I turned to cross the tunnel when my boot of the Sustainability Studies Program at Stony- making global issues relatable on a personal hit something soft—a tree trunk. I looked brook University, suggested in a 2015 TEDx level; avoiding both extremes of false opti- around and saw more stumps strewn about talk that people should open themselves up to mism and of immobilizing despair; and yet still the edge of the stream. Long strips of wet bark feeling “eco-grief,” but once they have experi- imparting an urgent message to act. peeled off them. I knelt down to touch one: it enced that emotion, they should let it become was cold and spongy and flecked with gravel. a catalyst for activism. In a Medium post, she Back at the Mendenhall, we paddled to the The trees, I would learn later, were thou- argued, “Hope exists in action.” far edge of the glacier where we’d heard there sands of years old. When the glacier grew What could that kind of transforma- was an ice cave. Under the cover of metallic during the last ice age, it plowed them over, tive storytelling look like in journalism, and clouds and soft spitting rain, we tugged the covering them in ice against the bedrock. Over what is standing in the way? In the 2019 essay canoe on a gravelly shore. Striated rock fins centuries, the layers of ice above the trees thick- “The Media are Complacent While the World jutted on either side, recently revealed by the ened and thinned as the warming and cooling Burns,” for The Nation and the Columbia Jour- receding ice. Farther upslope from the shore, we climate allowed. In the mid-twentieth century, nalism Review, Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope scrambled to the edge of a creek fed by water- the lake we’d paddled across began as a small called on journalists to take more responsibility falls that tumbled down nearby mountainsides. pond. The glacier shrunk, the pond grew, and for creating narratives that will actually inspire At the cave entrance, a rough-edged arch of now the trees had re-emerged. I turned my eyes a of necessary, collective action. Among ice framed a water-carved tunnel. We walked to the thousands of tons of glacier ice suspended the foreseeable challenges, they noted: “The slowly into the dim blue light, ducking to avoid overhead. I realized I’d been holding my breath. urgent question is how: What are the climate the water that streamed off the roof. Inside, the Matthew stood behind his tripod and stories that will resonate with viewers, listen- glossy ceiling was high enough for us to stand. motioned to me to move to the middle of the ers, and readers? What do those stories look Moisture seeped over it, dripping down slip- tunnel. My arm stretched upward, and my like, concretely, and how can they be differ- pery walls of blue that pulsed with energy. A fingers brushed the cold ceiling. His shutter ent from a status quo that is clearly failing? narrow creek gurgled over the rocky floor. clicked over the echoing water as he attempted And even if journalists can figure out a new Our voices bounced off the walls. We raised to capture this fleeting human encounter with

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[Photo] Located a short distance from Juneau, Alaska, Menden- hall Glacier is a hub for tourists. Every year the glacier retreats another 100 to 150 feet, and Mendenhall Lake, which began to form in the early 1900s, is now a mile and a half long. For more of Franklin’s writing on glaciers, see Alpinist 57. Manasseh Franklin a place that was, itself, in the process of rapid the land, “You just hear it talking to you, sing- inhabit, a role that glaciers continue to have transformation and loss. To say to the world, ing to you, reaching out to you, touching your today—especially for Inuit, Kalaalisut, Yupik, Yes, these changes really do exist whether you see spirit.... This is the way our people have believed Tlingit and many other Indigenous people— them every day or not. The story of these land- for thousands upon thousands of years.” even as the ice diminishes. Given the over- scapes is also far bigger and more awe-striking Art could be an avenue to another kind of whelming power and importance of these than you could possibly imagine. vantage point, one in which viewers might lose forces of nature, how could we not do every- themselves, along with their individual fears and thing in our power to preserve glaciers—which No doubt: there is enormous value in the anxieties, in intense wonder. Such experiences is, in fact, a symbol for doing everything in our visceral experience of standing on a glacier as it could become a crucial element of climate activ- power to preserve humanity? cracks and shatters around you; in witnessing ism. In a study published in the 2015 Journal Appreciation of the natural world won’t glacial melt pour into rivers that lead to the sea; of Personality and Social Psychology, the authors save the planet by itself. But it could do some- in the sensory overload derived from watching found that feeling a sense of awe before works of thing deeper, something longer lasting and more light shift and glint across ice at sunset. Fortu- art and wonders of nature could elicit “the feel- sustaining than merely tossing public conscious- nately, we all don’t have to travel to such places ing of being diminished in the presence of some- ness into a blender of horror and devastation. to access their magic. We can also turn to an thing greater than the self” and thus awaken a Reverence—including the kind evoked by the age-old form of landscape reportage: art. sense of “collective concern” and a desire to take time-lapse images of Chasing Ice—helps give us The photographs of Camille Seaman, for part in “collective action.” a better understanding of what we’re losing, and example, capture massive, angular ice sheets What pulled me out of my own darkness perhaps in the process illuminates what we can, as they drift in dark polar waters against the was the glaciers themselves: the melodic trickle and are willing to, do to fight for it. backdrop of pewter skies. Zaria Forman’s large- of water streaming down a glacier surface at scale pastel glacier drawings appear so crisp and midday; the long scratches etched like hiero- We filed out of the Mendenhall ice cave luminous that you feel as if you could walk glyphs in nearby bedrock that tell the tale of the quietly, absorbed in our own thoughts. By right into them and touch the rippled walls ice that once lived atop it. The way the water the time we were back on the crusted glacier of glowing blue seracs. Partly inspired by the gushed from glacier mouths in torrents, carving surface, the clouds had broken into soft clumps. work of Victorian scientists, Ian van Coller’s sinuous passages to oceans, to bays, to rivers, A golden glow bathed the ice fins beside us and mixed media project, Naturalists of the Long to irrigation ditches, to dams, to city spigots. I the lake surface before us. Matthew set up his Now, combines austere photos of ragged began to see glaciers not just as melting abstrac- tripod for one last time lapse. I placed my pack glaciers with scientific notes. His intention, he tions, but as stunning and immense fresh water on the ice and sat cross-legged on top of it. explains in his artist statement, is “to encour- storage systems. I saw them as providers and Clouds shifted across the lake as the shutter age people to think in terms of longer spans of regulators, but also as something more concep- click…click…clicked in steady intervals. time, and consider what humanity will look tual: keepers of esoteric experiences; physical I closed my eyes and inhaled. Damp air like in 100 or even 10,000 years—instead of places where timescales expanded into thou- swelled in my lungs. The creek gurgled. A bit of just considering our personal and immediate sands, millions of years that reduced my small gravel slid down a glacier fin and landed with a desires.” In 2015, David Katzeek, a local Tlin- life to a tiny fraction. Most of all, I began to resounding plop. The icebergs glittered. White git man, told KTVA of how he and his brother appreciate them as architects of the physical terns swooped between them. The green valley visit the Mendenhall Glacier to play music for landscapes and cultural worlds that humans sides glowed with an ineffable urgency. z

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