The history of ice: How glaciers became an endangered species

In recent decades, glaciers have become both a key icon for global warming and a type of endangered species. But to understand why glaciers are so inexorably tied to global warming and why people lament the loss of ice, it is necessary to look beyond climate science and glacier melting-to turn additionally to culture, history, and power relations. Probing historical views of glaciers demonstrates that the recent emergence of an "endangered glacier" narrative stemmed from various glacier perspectives dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: glaciers as menace, scientific laboratories, sublime scenery, recreation sites, places to explore and conquer, and symbols of wilderness. By encompassing so many diverse meanings, glacier and global warming discourse can thus offer a platform to implement historical ideologies about nature, science, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global power dynamics.