The Multiple Deaths of Glaciers: Climatic, Categorical, Metaphoric

Abstract

After a funeral for Iceland’s Okjökull, remembered as the world’s first glacier lost to climate change, glacier funerals have become a more widespread practice. Similar ceremonies were soon held for the Pizol glacier in Switzerland and Clark glacier in Oregon. While the goal of this practice is to draw attention to the impact of global warming on ice, they have been critiqued for commending the efforts of activists while eschewing attention to the underlying problem. But when does glacier death occur, for whom, and according to what criteria? I examine both scientific and literary framings, narratives, and representations of glacier deaths and glacier funerals. I find that these practices build on language in glaciology for ‘dead ice’ and on a long (and contested) tendency for ice to be metaphorically associated with death or stillness. Accepting the fact of climate change induced glacier retreat, I focus instead on the crisis of narrative presented by glacier funerals and trace the multiple places in which their death is registered and narrated. I approach glacier death as a problematizable categorical and discursive act separate from yet entangled with melting. Drawing on STS literature, I examine glaciers and glacier funerals as boundary objects or boundary practices across different communities and examine classifications and status-denigrations in glaciology as a death-dealing act. I then connect this narrative to understandings of language as a 'freezing' device and of representation as a kind of 'killing.' I conclude by highlighting examples of, and possibilities for, alternative, lively understandings of glaciers.