By Gabriele Dürbeck & Simon Probst
This text was first published in German: https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/177
The thoughts we present in this blog post will be developed more systematically in an essay to be published next year: Probst, Simon und Gabriele Dürbeck (2025). Ice Witnesses. Exploring the Natural-Cultural Memory of Climate Change (Susan Schuppli’s Learning from Ice) Memory Studies Review, Special Issue Climate Witnessing.
In scientific as well as journalistic and literary texts, ice is given many names that contextualize it in the spheres of historiography and memory. In poetic phrasings, which can also be found in scientific discussions of ice, it is referred to as a “two-mile time machine”,[1] as “ice memory”,[2] as “frozen time”,[3] as a “book” to be read or as the “ice of truth”.[4]. In these formulations, ice becomes at once a vehicle for visualizing the past, a spatialization of time and a medium that stores and transmits information. A metaphorical trace can also be found in the scientific terminology of ice as a ‘climate witness’ or ‘climate archive’. Such language charges ice’s materiality with ideas of the institutional storage and collection of historical documents, the privileged access to the past that eyewitnesses happen to have, as well as with images of the judicial trial of the course of events. The metaphorical transfer of these ideas into the context of climate history suggests an initially vaguely defined function of ice in the cultural memory of climate change.
The technical term ‘climate proxy’ seems, at first glance, to set limits to the metaphorization of ice. Climate proxies generally refer to material traces that allow scientists to determine approximate values for past climates – even when no measurements are available. These include, among others, tree rings, coral skeletons, deep-sea sediments, and ice cores. But metaphorization is often present and so these material formations are often referred to as ‘natural archives’. And because potentially legible traces of the past are inscribed into these material formations, their totality is sometimes conceptualized as planetary memory, or ‘memory of the Earth’. [5] In this expression, the metaphor of memory and practices of natural science are closely related.
However, these archives and climate proxies – the ‘memory of the earth’ – are by no means ‘natural’: they are produced through scientific procedures and cultural processes of interpretation. [6] In the case of ice, expeditions are first required to extract ice cores – endeavours that take place, among other things, in a cultural context of heroic discovery, in which scientific teams compete to find ever older ice. These cores are packaged, labelled with contextual information and transported to mostly government-funded deep-freeze storage facilities, where they are archived according to various classification criteria. In a next step, scientists take the ice cores to specialised laboratories, where they use mechanical methods to isolate the very old air bubbles trapped in the ice – traces of long-gone atmospheres – and then subject them to chemical analysis. The results of these analyses are subsequently categorized and interpreted in the context of geological knowledge. Only through these steps can a wide range of conclusions be drawn about past climates: from the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere to the amount of snowfall, wind speeds, and the concentrations of carbon dioxide and air pollution.
Such ‘natural archives’ are indispensable for writing historiography in the Anthropocene. On the one hand, they allow us to look beyond historical sources in order to better understand the links between social developments and the environment. On the other hand, they make it possible to scientifically trace the history of climate far beyond the beginning of systematic weather recordings. They also enable us to assess the increasingly intensive enrichment of the Earth’s atmosphere with CO2 since the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent warming of the Earth’s atmosphere in a larger climate-historical context. It is only in the context of this larger picture that it becomes clear that the current human-induced climate change is bringing a period of relative stability in the Earth system to an end: the Holocene. – The stability of the Holocene now has lasted for over 11,700 years and its man-made destabilisation thus poses an enormous risk to the continued existence of global civilisations.
Computational models of climatological futures that form the foundation of international climate policy, also depend on the Earth historical knowledge gained from the ice and other material formations. Thus, the understanding of our present moment in the context of a planetary history and all the resulting efforts at adaption and transformation are based not least on the cultural conditioning of nature as an archive for the Earth’s history. Identity-forming narratives are thus linked to the interpretation and updating of this archive in the public debate on climate change. In this sense, in the context of a planetary history and the diagnosis of the present, socially and culturally mediated approaches to the past are no longer based solely on symbolic forms of externalised memory (books, monuments, rituals, etc.), but also on non-intentional material traces of natural processes. In this respect, cultural memory in the context of Anthropocene histories must be described as natural-cultural memory.
The perspective of natural-cultural memory opens our eyes for the scientific and cultural practices through which material traces assume an archival function and ultimately find their way into social constructions of the past, present, and future that are relevant for identity formations. Analyzing these practices, makes the production of nature-cultural memory accessible to a critique of the underlying assumptions and epistemologies.
The object of such a cultural critique of ice could be, for example, that the scientific study of ice usually places the information gained from it in the context of a global Western history. Events such as the birth of Jesus Christ, the fall of Rome, the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, the Industrial Revolution or human-induced climate change are usually projected onto the time scale of ice cores.[7] In contrast, little attention is paid to the stories of the people who live on and with the ice, whose ‘cold rights’ are not respected and whose living environments are disappearing. The practice of archiving and destroying ice in order to make it legible (either by melting or smashing it) also reduces it to an object of rational cognition. These scientific relations to ice run the risk of being ignorant to ice as a threatened habitat of humans and other beings, a habitat with which people maintain culturally significant relationships of reciprocity and for whom it is an animated part of their everyday narratives. [8]
Many fundamental questions arise for the reflection in cultural studies on natural archives and the production of nature-cultural memory: How are ‘natural archives’ entangled with colonial and neo-colonial epistemologies? What would it mean to decolonise these archives? Who do the planetary stories told on this basis address? Which ‘we’ do they produce? Who do they include, who do they exclude? What kinds of cultural identities do they support, produce or destabilise? How much are planetary histories and Anthropocene narratives determined by practices of producing ‘natural archives’? Are institutionalised relations to the ‘memory of the Earth’ conceivable that go beyond modern geosciences? And do cultural groups reflect on the role of material traces as the basis of our natural-cultural memory recognised or does it remain largely unconscious?
In contemporary literature and art, first attempts to consciously reflect on natural-cultural memory can be found. According to Canadian researcher and media artist Susan Schuppli, material witnesses such as ice tell us at least as much about the events that have left traces on them as they do about the infrastructures used to produce the evidence of these events and to negotiate their meaning.[9] These infrastructures include technological apparatuses, scientific procedures, epistemological assumptions, and the acceptable forms of narrative and the representation of events. In her film Ice Cores, Schuppli uses slow, almost meditative shots to show everyday life in an ice core archive: the arrival of new ice cores from a disbanded archive, their examination by two researchers, their classification, the discussion about the quality of the preserved ice material, but also the extraction of air bubbles in a laboratory. At the end of the film, the camera moves vertically along an ice core for about a minute and a half, showing us the shimmering air bubbles in the ice as well as the core’s plastic packaging and the metadata written on it. Schuppli explains the significance of the core from off the screen:
Tiny bubbles of ancient air trapped within vertical columns of extracted ice, a planetary archive, whose records have enabled scientists to reconstruct a continuous history of past climates, reaching back more than 800,000 years: earth evidence of a rapidly heating world.[10]
What the film shows us, however, is not just the material basis and everyday life of scientific research. Rather, it shows us the production of ‘natural archives’, drawing attention to an often-neglected site of work on cultural memory, without which the story of the Anthropocene would be incomprehensible.
Translation: Anna-Lena Eick and Tom Vanassche
[1] Alley, Richard B. (2000). The two-mile time machine. Ice cores, abrupt climate change, and our future. Princeton University Press.
[2] Kolbert, Elizabeth (2002). Ice Memory. New Yorker, January 7.
[3] Walker, Gabrielle (2004). Frozen Time. Nature 429 (6992): 596–97.
[4] Schröder, Tim (2021). Eis der Wahrheit. MARE 148: 58–66, hier 58.
[5] Colebrook, Claire (2018). The intensity of the archive. Memory Studies 11(4): 506-509, hier 507.
[6] Toepfer, Georg (2019). On similarities and differences between cultural and natural archives. In Susi. Frank & Kjetil Jakobsen (Hg.), Arctic archives. Ice, memory, and entropy (S. 21–36). Transcript, hier 31.
[7] Antonello, Alessandro & Cary, Mark. (2017). Ice cores and the temporalities of the global environment. Environmental Humanities 9(2): 181-203, here 191.
[8] Cruikshank, J. (2005). Do Glaciers listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. UBC Press, 3.
[9] Schuppli, Susan (2020). Material Witness. Media, Forensics, Evidence. MIT Press, 3.
[10] Schuppli, Susan (2020). Ice Cores. Film, 1:04:35-1:04:55. https://vimeo.com/374626847.