Dissertation Grant: Temporal Ice: Deciphering Deep Time in the Cryosphere

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project draws together scholarship from history and geography to uncover the history of scientific research on ice and how it has been used by naturalists and scientists to understand geological timescales and to predict future ecological change. Evidence extracted from ice has fundamentally recalibrated scientific conceptions of earth's deep history: the theory of the Ice Ages revealed the planet's radical changeability, and evidence from ice cores showed a globe that rapidly flickers between different meteorological states. Data for the project will come from documents gathered at national archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and these will be complimented by analyses of published scientific papers and visual materials. Overall, this project traces our changing scientific conceptions of ice over the past two hundred years to highlight its importance for advancing scientific understanding of the planet as an interconnected system with a deep past and a deep future. This is an investigation into the cryosphere - those portions of the Earth's surface that are covered in solid ice - and into the ways in which scientists have studied and conceptualized it over the past two hundred years. Analyses of ice have provided critical ecological data that has enabled scientists to appreciate the true depth of the Earth's history and to understand patterns of environmental change and systematic meteorological variability over time. Data for this multi-method project come from collections at several national archives and from historically relevant scientific papers and visual models. Systematic qualitative documentary analysis will be used to analyze these data and enhance our understanding of how research on the cryosphere has shaped our collective understanding of the environmental history and future of Earth. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.