Ice Rocks
For three weeks in the autumn of 2017, I spent my days with glaciers. Each morning and afternoon during a residency that sailed the coast of the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, a group of bundled up artists would venture ashore to shoot film, make rubbings, sketch watercolours, pour moulds and write. Whatever the medium, the aim was the same: to capture, at different levels of abstraction, the glaciers that loomed over us, a backdrop of vivid blue against the grey and purple sea and sky. At Ymerbukta, the glacier hugged us close, a jagged wall cutting directly into the sea. At Martøya, the glacier lurked further away, sloping to the earth languid and cat-like.1 And at Fjortende Julibukta, the glacier surprised us. We had traipsed, clumsy in our muck boots, along a stony beach, eyes trained downwards to avoid rolled ankles. Rounding a turn, we suddenly encountered the ice, like fingers outstretched, able to be touched. One by one, my shipmates turned towards the more distant body of the glacier – beautiful, blue and bright – shedding icy chunks that sent waves surging to our shore. But I was struck by the far less glamorous ice that stretched out beside us, dirt-filled and mucky, busy at work grinding up land beneath it. Most of us – myself included – had travelled to the Arctic expecting ice to speak of climate change, each thunderous moment of calving articulating our rapidly melting world.2 But this gritty and old ice seemed to speak in an entirely different mode. Back turned to the spectacular glacier and the spectre of climate change, I took off my glove and touched the old ice, marbled with mud and stone. The rocks embedded in the ice felt at once distinct from and part of the frozen matter, swept along as cargo by the plasticity of the viscous solid. There, in the friction-filled space of ice and rock, sediment that would one day settle into strata was being churned up. Frozen in a state of transformation the ice, and the fragments of rock it contained, were part assemblage and part process, manifesting change over deep time in the Pleistocene.
This geologic process of the ice I touched in Svalbard is the genesis of this article. Crucially, it sparked reflection on the archival research I had been conducting on a branch of Antarctic science focused on how the southern ice sheets gather up a very particular kind of rock. While in our rapidly heating world the importance of ice as a climatological interlocutor is self-evident, in this article I want to explore a conception of ice that is attentive to an alternate history the material can tell. I therefore consider how ice can be engaged at a different register, one in which it is understood more as part of a rocky lineage that speaks of geologic – rather than climatologic – temporal change. By ‘geo-logic’ I mean rock-oriented, not necessarily Earth-bound: in this story, the relationship between meteorites from far across the cosmos and Antarctic ice take centre stage.3
Attention to the geologic and viscous nature of ice brings to bear three fundamental interventions of this special issue, which holds the vitality of ice, in all its iterations, at its centre. The first relates to the materiality of ice itself. Particularly when conceived of within the schema of the climate crisis, ice is understood as the frozen form of water: a solid that hovers close to its melting point, rapidly transforming into liquid all around us. However, ice – particularly glacier ice – is also a monomineralic rock, an important part of geomorphologic processes that shape and contour the Earth's surface. A starting point for this piece is therefore to ask how, when understood as a viscous rock, ice takes on a different mode of vitality.4 Second, this article traces an important thread of this special issue: temporality, particularly how ice can complicate a teleological, linear narrative of change and non-human, deep geologic history. While ice cores, and the stratigraphic layers that make them such powerful palaeoclimatological proxies, fit neatly within a linear sense of environmental change, other features of ice – particularly its viscosity and the matter it contains – ‘glitch’ such temporal flows. As I will endeavour to show, these glitches are sites of productivity and provocation that turn our attention towards the more volatile nature of non-human time. This brings me to the third intervention of this article: an exploration of the question posed in the introduction: beyond doomsday, what is ice telling us? I want to suggest that considering ice-as-rock and in relation to rocks – including rocks from beyond Earth – draws attention away from the at times overwhelming framing of climatological catastrophe that dominates narratives of ice. Instead, by pointing towards a more capricious vision of the material, we are reminded that icy rhythms flux, flow and form vast, complex and temperamental relations that far exceed human imaginaries. This of course does not mean concern for anthropogenic environmental disaster is moot; rather, it serves to remind us that current capitalist-consumerist modes of living are interacting with forces that exceed comprehension, and should therefore be treated with far more deference.
As a historian of science and the environment, the method and sources central to this article are archival. To trace how Antarctic ice and rock complicate notions of temporal change, I draw on historical documents produced by a range of agencies and individuals involved in what would become known as the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET), held predominantly at scientific and state institutions across Washington, DC. Excepting participants in ANSMET – in particular Ursula Marvin, who was both a planetary scientist and historian – little scholarly attention has been given to the ice–rock assemblage I focus on here. This is, I believe, a reflection of the ambiguity with which Antarctic meteorites were treated after their initial discovery: the rocks, and the ice that gathered them, did not fit neatly under the purview of one scientific field, nor under the scope of what was deemed to be valuable polar science. This is of course relevant historically (it is an example of how disciplines police and protect their borders); but it is also relevant anthropologically. As a field interested in how objects contribute to life-worlds – in what objects do more than what they are – the literal and conceptual impact of meteorites in ice and time is a provocative topic.5 Julie Cruikshank, writing on glaciers, Kristen Hastrup, writing on ice sheets, and Juliette Yip, writing on sea ice, have each shown ice to be an essential socio-cultural actor (Cruikshank 2005; Hastrup 2013; Yip 2022). The same, I argue, is true for the mélange of ice and meteorites in Antarctica. This history of Antarctic meteorite collecting therefore expands beyond the archives to engage questions relevant to humanists and social scientists interested in rethinking human–nature relations on the new and unwieldy scales, both spatial and temporal, that are bearing down on us in this age of eco/geological crisis.
In the following sections, I lay out the importance of ice, and particularly its viscosity, to the ‘geologic turn’ that has been occurring across the humanities and social sciences. I give historical detail on the discovery of and subsequent research into Antarctic meteorites, highlighting the essential role ice viscosity played in rendering patches of the continent a ‘meteorite museum’ (Yoshida 2010: 279). I then use Legacy Russell's conception of the ‘glitch’ to show how ice and meteorites scrambled time, usefully challenging chronostratigraphic (that is, orderly and forward-marching) notions of environmental deep time. To conclude, I return to my fieldwork on the opposite side of the planet to highlight how my response to the rock-filled ice exemplifies a repositioning in thinking of, and with, the geos.
Geo-logics
My attention to the vital nature of ice-as-rock positions the frozen material as part of the ‘geologic turn’ that has increasingly defined areas of the humanities and social sciences in recent decades. This shift reflects the claim, articulated by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, that all history is a geo-history (Deleuze and Guattari 1994).6 Temporality is a powerful thread in the geologic turn: how ‘human’ time and ‘geologic’ non-human time have been understood as distinct or entangled – and the speed with which humans are impacting geologic and environmental rhythms – underpin scholarly attention to the geos. Whether termed Anthropocene, Capitalocene or Chthulucene, scholars (and the broader public) increasingly have deep time on the mind (Chakrabarty 2009; Moore 2016; Haraway 2016).
As this non-human ‘deep’ time has come under historical scrutiny, scholars have paid particular attention to the histories of fossil fuels embedded in the strata of the planet and the political, economic and environmental contours of their rapid extraction. The deep, slow time of fossil fuel creation – a process of carbonisation that takes millions of years – is set in contrast to the shallow time of human intervention. While this attention is certainly justified, this binary also reflects a longer history of how the notion of ‘deep time’ has been formulated. The term itself is relatively new, popularised by John McPhee (1982) as a poetic phrase to replace the more traditional ‘geologic time’ that was underpinned by the paradigm of uniformitarianism – a conception of temporal change that rose to prominence through the nineteenth century in association with geologist Charles Lyell.7 Uniformitarianism hinges on an unchanging set of physical laws and their gradual and constant impact: a trickle of water carving the Grand Canyon or the minute deposit of sediments forming the Himalayas exemplify the mechanism and temporality of uniformitarianism. Through it, first ‘geologic’ then ‘deep’ time was positioned as something lumbering, gradual and slow: a stark contrast to the rapid, staccato time of human history. This binary seems intuitive, particularly given that, thanks to the actions of a specific group of humans, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased more in the past 200 years than it did over the previous 20,000.
The tempo of this temporal tale can, however, be misleading. Increasingly, scientists have found evidence in earthly archives that reject this rather passive picture of deep time, instead uncovering a planet capable of sudden and dramatic change. As geographer Nigel Clark writes, it is now clear that ‘transitions in the overall earth system can be surprisingly abrupt – with climate and other entangled subsystems shifting their entire operating state in timescales briefer than a human lifetime’ (2017: 214). This capacity for rapid change is coupled with a growing sense of planetary multiplicity. Rather than having a singular and linear history, geochemists suggest that the planet is ‘a number of different Earths that have succeeded each other in time, each with very different chemical, physical and biological states’ (Zalasiewicz cited in Clark and Yusoff 2017: 5). Thus, as Kathryn Yusoff writes, ‘Anthropocene science is articulating that there is not one but many Earths, preexistent and possible, within this particular geochemical-cosmic milieu’ (2019: 8). The notion of deep time, laden with historical baggage that conjures up such a sense of profundity and vastness, can therefore obscure the active, jolt-filled, capriciousness of Earth's non-human past and future. But if the geos is to be taken seriously as a historical actor, the extent of its activeness throughout deep time must be, too.8
It is not surprising, then, that as Nigel Clark, Alexandra Gormally and Hugh Tuffen suggest, a central goal of the geologic turn is to remind us not just that the human world is bound to deep time, but rather ‘just how often the Earth has interrupted – and rebooted – its own temporal flows’ (2018: 290). This shift involves decentring the human, being attentive to the myriad worlds that exist beyond human-oriented temporality and acknowledging the inherent fluidity of things – be that rocks or continents or planets – that have, at least within the paradigm of Western scientific conceptions of nature, been seen as something more solid and timeless.
I suggest that ice-as-rock is a powerful lens through which to engage with this reformulation of deep time. As anthropologist Cristián Simonetti writes, ‘Slippery yet sticky, eternal yet ephemeral, aseptic yet animated, ice remains a truly paradoxical substance to Western science’ (2022: 112). Contention over the nature of ice permeated the earliest scientific forays into understanding the material. As a substance defined as viscous, an ‘anomaly in the standard classification of states of matter’, ice challenged the binaries of solid and fluid that shaped conceptions of both the physical and social world (Simonetti 2022: 114). Simonetti demonstrates this tension via nineteenth-century debates over glacial movement – put crudely, James David Forbes’ fluid flow versus John Tyndall's solid fracture – which turned on the question of how ice did not conform with established principles of movement (Simonetti 2022; Kaalund 2017). This material puzzle highlights how distinctions that seem so fixed – like whether something is a solid or a liquid – are in fact unstable. As evinced a century later via quantum physics and geochemistry, when recalibrated to different scales, most anything is viscous (Barad 2007; Mason 1966). For Simonetti, viscosity moves beyond the material to articulate new ways of conceiving of ‘life and sociality’: one where ‘gluey relationships’ rather than tidy distinctions are what make worlds (2022: 126).
Here, I emphasise how the confounding viscosity of ice can specifically recalibrate thinking on deep time, reframing it as something active and capricious; moving from linear and ordered to scrambled and diffuse. By seeing ice as a rock that flows, sweeping rocky kin along with it, we can perceive moments when deep temporality is ‘glitched’, which in turn makes the multiplicity of Earth's ‘own temporal flows’ visible. The viscous, rocky nature of ice I engage with here therefore enables us to both follow the geologic turn and build out more completely our conception of what materials – and movements – comprise the lively geos we think, live and act with. There are many examples of the sticky, viscous, nature of ice – from the relocation of massive erratic rocks in the ice ages to the trapped fossil atmosphere found in ice cores. Here, however, I focus on a lesser-known story of ice and rock: in Antarctica, alien meteorites have been gathered up, swept along and preserved through time by the viscous, sticky nature of ice itself.
Of Ice and Meteorites
In 1969, a group of scientists working as part of the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE) arrived on the southern continent to survey the mountains of East Antarctica. Before they left Tokyo, Masao Gorai, a prominent scientist and member of the Special Committee on Antarctic Research, had jokingly asked the team to bring him ‘a gift of ultramafic rocks and/or meteorites’, not expecting them to find anything of the kind – meteorites are exceedingly rare, and Antarctica is exceedingly vast (Yoshida 2010: 273). But during their three months in the field, while laboriously measuring the landscape on foot, the JARE team collected nine strange rocks from patches of blue ice – so named because of the unique hue that develops when ice has been under extreme glacial pressure. Gorai received the specimens in Tokyo in March 1970, but being so sure that the idea of Antarctic meteorites was absurd, he didn't immediately analyse them. Months later, when he removed the black and pockmarked rocks from their storage boxes, he was shocked to discover getemonos (meaning ‘monstrously odd’) objects, and began to suspect his interstellar joke had become reality. At the start of July, Gorai sent a telegram to JARE confirming that all nine samples were meteorites. ‘According to what you told me,’ he wrote in a follow-up letter, ‘these meteorites were collected from a single small area; however, it is impossible to imagine that several meteorites with different lithologies would occur together within such a small area of ordinary land . . . This is indeed a natural ‘Meteorite Museum’ that made me extremely amazed and shocked’ (Yoshida 2010: 279).
Since the 1969 discovery, Antarctica – specifically those places where ancient blue ice is pushed upwards from below – have become the global centre for meteorite hunting. The numbers of meteorites found is truly astounding: research teams gather hundreds, if not thousands, of space rocks each field season.9 Fragments originating from asteroids and other planets, meteorites are commonly over 4.5 billion years old, and their scientific value for understanding the deepest past of the solar system is unparalleled: they are material morsels of the deepest of deep time. Hearing about the frozen Antarctic meteorites in 1981, Isaac Asimov wrote with awe that ‘the clearest route to knowledge about the early days of the solar system will lie not in space at all, but, like the bluebird of happiness, will be found in our own backyard’ (1981: 126). Space, it turned out, was in Antarctica, not ‘out there’ after all.
The ice of Antarctica, specifically its viscous nature, causes the concentration of interstellar rocks that Gorai dubbed a ‘meteorite museum’. As they fall on the vast continent – which currently maps twice the size of Australia – meteorites are subsumed into the ice sheet and carried as it spreads slowly outwards, like a pour of pancake batter, from centre to periphery. Flowing downstream from the vast plateau of internal Antarctica, ice gathers up meteorites that have fallen far apart, drawing them gradually together as it moves. And as the ice compacts vertically, meteorites are pushed further downwards as newer ice forms atop them. While most end up at the edge of the ice sheet and are carried away in icebergs to be lost at sea, in certain regions of the continent topographic features cause blockages that push the deep, ancient ice, and the meteorites it contains, upwards to ‘ablation zones’ made up of deep blue, ancient ice (Figure 1).
Antarctic meteorite ice flow. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 19-001, Ursula B. Marvin Papers, Box 4, Folder 6. ‘Photos Antarctica c1982’
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 32, 1; 10.3167/saas.2024.320105
Like the erratic rocks of the nineteenth century, then, meteorites were a cargo, caught up in the expansion and flow of the geomorphological agency of ice. But while in more temperate zones where erratic rocks were studied the ice had receded, leaving behind only the trace of its movement, in Antarctica, the ice – the sticky medium of collection – persists.
The concentration of meteorites, studding ancient blue ice patches on the surface, can be understood as a sticky consolidation of space and time that solved a core problem for meteoritics: that meteorites, and particularly freshly fallen ones, were very hard to find.10 Moreover, the frigid temperatures and abiotic landscape meant the rocks were preserved almost perfectly from their moment of impact, the ice stopping the clock on the ‘terrestrial age’ of the rocks and preventing the cosmic material from decaying.11 The primordial material from the depths of space is a kind of fossilised cosmos, preserved, gathered and displayed by the ice. For researchers interested in a natural history that exceeded the time of the Earth, these meteorites were an unparalleled find. They lay there, easily identifiable oddly shaped black dots embedded in bright blue ice – nuggets of cosmic time in a geomorphologic clock – ‘like apples waiting to be picked’ (Marvin 1983; Figure 2).
Antarctic meteorite in ice. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 19-001, Ursula B. Marvin Papers, Box 4, Folder 6. ‘Photos Antarctica c1982’
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 32, 1; 10.3167/saas.2024.320105
While slower to garner attention, blue ice patches would likewise prove to be of great scientific significance. As Bill Cassidy, the galvanising force behind ANSMET, put it, while early on the meteorites were recognised as a ‘treasure trove’, less attention was given to the ‘treasure chest’ of the blue ice itself (Cassidy 2003). However, as information about the Antarctic discovery spread to glaciologists, they quickly saw the blue ice that carried the meteorites as the material most full of potential. That ice sheets flowed outwards and built layers through time was relatively well established by the 1970s, but ice that surged up from below and could be recognised as old, even ancient, was a new and enthralling discovery.12 Suddenly, ice rich with the paleoclimatological information about an Antarctic, and global, past could easily be found exposed at the surface. Normally deep drilling was required to access such ice – in the 1970s, still a relatively new process that was cumbersome, costly and resulted in a sample size limited by the diameter of the drill bit.13 Blue ice, in contrast, sat on the surface and had moved from a vertical plane to a horizontal one as it was forced upwards. As cosmo-chemist Ghislaine Crozaz explained, the cost and accessibility advantages of this ancient ice were therefore immense. ‘Just as meteorites are often called “the poor man's space probe”,’ she wrote, ‘meteorite stranding surfaces may become known as “the poor man's probe into our past climate”’ (1988: 11). There was so much ancient ice exposed that glaciologists proposed segments of it could be hacked out with a chainsaw: a far more efficient, though less delicate, means of gathering chunks of ice to be analysed for its palaeoclimatological data (Figure 3). To extend Cassidy's metaphor, then, while blue ice acted as a ‘treasure chest’ for meteorites, meteorites were an ‘x marks the spot’ for palaeoclimatological research, showing where to access ice from into the deepest reaches of the ice sheet's past. Making the blue ice temporally legible would, however, prove to be more complicated than the above image suggests.
Potential for blue ice timelines, removed with chainsaw (Cassidy and Whillans 1990)
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 32, 1; 10.3167/saas.2024.320105
Geo-logic Glitching
As it amasses over time, ice, like sandstone, forms in layers that can be read in a sequential order. This is a transcription onto ice of a central and fundamental concept in the logic of geology: stratigraphy, a system for interpreting rock layers in a succession that reveal progressive changes to the earth over time (Rudwick 2005). While the idea of superposition of rock layers can be traced as early as the seventeenth century, it was in the early nineteenth century that stratigraphy was understood to reveal dynamic temporal change, made legible by the relative and relational location of strata.14 This relational rock system rendered the ground an archive, one that could be read historically as moving from past to present: an idea that underpins the notion of deep time and natural change today (Sepkoski 2017).
From the 1930s, ice was increasingly understood as a stratigraphic material par excellence: the pressure and compression of the frozen material creating neat, high-resolution layers of accumulation that scientists can interpret down to the level of years. This stratigraphic reading holds true from early twentieth-century iceberg and pit studies and is, of course, foundational to ice-core research. The vertical dimension of intrusions into ice sheets are an axis that moves temporally backwards, neatly capturing both time and climatic change (Achermann 2020; Antonello and Carey 2017). But the viscosity of Antarctic blue ice – which so effectively gathered meteorites – posed problems for such an orderly, chronostratigraphic interpretation.
In contrast to the tidy stacking of ice cores or sedimentary rocks, blue ice scrambled time just as it gathered it. Flowing over a ragged topography for millennia as it moved from the centre to the periphery, the ice filled with faults and distortions, thereby becoming illegible under the traditional rules of stratification outlined above. As one scientist wrote in-credulously on receiving samples of blue ice, ‘I don't believe the age estimates given! What did they [the field team] do, “look” at the ice surface and declare the age?’15 At the same time, there was nothing linear about the arrival or deposition of meteorites: the rocks had entered the planet's atmosphere and landed in Antarctica at random.16 The gathered meteorites could be assigned an age, but pin pointing when they had landed on Earth was not as straightforward. The meteorites, all of which arrived at different moments and touched down in different places, spoke more of ice as a process than as a clock. This ice–rock amalgam therefore echoes a more confounding aspect of geologic archives: that gaps in material and time are produced by morphing, rifting and shifting rocks (or ice).
Material gaps in the geologic record caused by deposition are termed a hiatus; those caused by erosion a vacuity: together these words, bursting with absence, are ‘geologic unconformities’. In the logic of stratigraphy, these gaps are problematic: they are the material manifestation of lost time, aporic spaces that resist knowing. However, in his Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, Hugh Raffles repositions these gaps and absences, seeing them as breaks, yes, but as valuable in their own right. Weaving together stories of the geological and the personal, Raffles writes that ‘life is filled with unconformities – revealing holes in time that are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, and understanding’ (2020: 5). Far from being an aporia from which nothing can be known, a hiatus in meaning or a vacuity of value, for Raffles the unconformities refute not knowledge, but rather the notion that knowledge must always be linear, totalised and absolute. The scrambled deep time of blue ice, studded with the deeper temporality of cosmic material, is a powerful example of an unconformity, one where the very process of unconforming is made visible in the flow of the ice itself.
This is not to say that the temporal quality of ice and meteorites could not be incorporated into scientific knowledge about the changing ice sheet. Since the 1980s, researchers have developed methods to study the relationality between ice, meteorites and threads of dust that are woven through the frozen matter to produce ‘time horizons’, also referred to as ‘fiducial points for the age scale’, from which to extrapolate dates (Cassidy and Whillans 1990: 7).17 Here, however, I want to move beyond glaciological knowledge-making to focus on how the viscous ice–meteorite assemblage helps us think through the materiality of a cosmic unconformity, one that can highlight the multiple temporalities that are so essential to a robust sense of geohistory. To do so, I turn to the concept of glitch. In her work Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), cyberfeminist Legacy Russell highlights the potential of the glitch for thinking of different temporal flows. While for Raffles unconformities reveal the potential of absences, for Russell glitches are resolutely present. She argues that a glitch is not a negative break in a system, but rather an opportunity to see beyond the homogenous and oppressive structures in which we live and which shape and restrict our lives.18 ‘Glitch moves,’ Russell writes, ‘but glitch also blocks. It incites movement while simultaneously creating an obstacle. Glitch prompts and glitch prevents. With this, glitch becomes a catalyst, opening up new pathways, allowing us to seize on new directions’ (2020: 49). Antarctica's viscous and flowing blue ice is, I propose, full of glitches that, like the computer glitches of Russell's manifesto, create epistemological recalibrations.
How, then, to understand this process of irregular flow and fusion as a kind of geologic glitch? Most evidently, the staccato intervention of cosmic deep time, which is conflated with the flowing time of blue ice, presents a different temporality, one that isn't legible in chronostratigraphic terms. Less a sense of a sequential geohistory stretching backwards into an unknowable, lumbering past, this assemblage illuminates the variety and texture of non-human tempos. The temporality this assemblage embodies is not linear, but rather twists, turns and conflates – presenting a sense of the past that is capriciously active. By interrupting the perceived order of strata, the ice and meteorites produce their own set of relations, materialising what Deborah Bird Rose calls ‘embodied knots of multispecies time’ (2012: 136). While not species per se, the vitality inherent to different rocks is evident here: one flows viscous through time, the other tumbles chaotically through space. And, importantly, they come together to undertake a unique more-than-human voyage through time and space. By interrupting a human-centric ontology of deep time, glitches are thus laden with potential. The geologic glitch offers up an interruption that breaks open the more traditional uniformitarian sense of deep time, reminding us that stratigraphy is just one epistemological frame through which to understand the Earth.
This, then, is the second aspect of the geologic glitch that bares reflection. This scrambled, rock-studded ice is clear evidence of a geologic force that is neither gradual nor constant – the two tenets of uniformitarianism that have had such an influence on conceptions of deep time. Rather, these glitches are sudden and unpredictable, attributes anathema to traditional Western scientific conceptions of geologic change. For this reason, during the early period of geology, meteors and meteorites were seen to have no bearing on the planet's history. As American geologist T.C. Chamberlain put it in 1890, ‘The geological significance of meteorites is that they have no geological significance’ (quoted in Marvin 1980). But the plethora of meteorites in Antarctica – collected just as impact craters were being studied around the globe – increasingly positioned the space rocks as a significant part of Earth's geologic past. As ANSMET member Ursula Marvin explained, the growing collection of evidence of cosmic impacts showed that, ‘far from existing in isolation and subject only to processes of change that are intrinsic to it, the Earth hurtles around the Sun along a path that is gritty with interplanetary dust and rubble’ (2002: 17). This grit and rubble arrived on the Earth unpredictably and at times – such as during the KT event – changed the entire geochemical makeup of the planet dramatically.
The meteorites entrapped in Antarctic blue ice therefore did not just articulate the more capricious temporal flow of deep time, but one where erratic and chaotic collision from beyond the Earth was a frequent occurrence. The impact of these meteorites on geology as a science was, according to Marvin, immense: geologists ‘dropped our downward gazing view of the Earth as an isolated body . . . and began to view the Earth in context of the Solar System as a planet affected in fundamental ways by processes originating outside the Earth’ (Marvin 1981: 3, italics in original). These external, rocky interventions were therefore both materially and temporally relevant: small glitches that undermined long-held assertions of what the non-human past – and non-human space – looked like.
These ice–rock glitches are therefore at minimum a useful reminder that, as humanists and social scientists turn to the geos, we must resist uncritically incorporating foundational assumptions of geologic science that, even if modified in scientific circles, continue to permeate broader discussions of deep time, exemplified in images of neatly stacking geologic time charts (Figure 4).
Stratigraphic chart from the International Commission on Stratigraphy, 2023
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 32, 1; 10.3167/saas.2024.320105
This is particularly true when geo-logics are taken up to suggest a linear geologic temporality from which this Anthropocenic moment is a sudden and unprecedented break. This is of course not to suggest that the accelerating and alarming effects of human action and impact on the planet should be dismissed as simply additional examples of how the geos is prone to sudden and unpredictable change. Rather, the realisation that the ground beneath our feet and the air we breathe can change rapidly without our influence and in ways that can surprise us (and have done so) should make the impact of our geologic tinkering all the more disconcerting.19 What is crucial, however, is that conceiving of deep time as eventful and capricious – full of glitches and unconformities – helps reframe and deepen the discussions, both historical and philosophical, around the relationship between geology and humanity.
Conclusion: Experiencing the Glitch
My response to Julibukta glacier in Svalbard, where the important role of ice-as-rock contrasted suddenly with my assumptive association of ice with melt, was an experience that reflects this reframing. What I bore witness to was not the impact of fossil fuels on the frozen parts of our planet – a human-driven story (though one that of course cannot be told at the scale of species).20 Ice, I realised, should not be reduced to an indicator of climate, a material of melt or a siren of doomsday, for these are all narratives bound by anthropocentrism. Instead, I glimpsed a lithic relationship in which humans – whether at the scale of self, state or species – had no part. Holding on to this realignment gave me a new sense of the landscape and history I was standing on: ice pulled me, with its sticky, viscous might, into a far more complex engagement with non-human time and action. As one artist I met in Svalbard (and who I now collaborate with) put it, I witnessed ‘layers of deep time embedded in a single geographical point: a helix of histories gathered in a blip’ (Singh Soin and Rider 2021: 30).
This assertion – a striking individual encounter with the overwhelming vastness of the non-human – may seem to echo with tropes of the sublime, so frequently applied to places like Svalbard and Antarctica given their inhospitable environment and short human histories (neither are home to indigenous populations).21 I hope I have been neither as reductive nor as egocentric. Sublime conceptions of nature rest on a sense of otherness and a response of awe that, even in acknowledging the agency of the non-human, seems to keep it steadfastly ‘out there’. Such a duality does not capture the dynamic sense of relationality and change embodied in the ice I encountered in Svalbard or in the archives I have been drawing from in this article. As Simonetti suggests, the viscosity of ice highlights the ‘gluey relationships’ not just of materials, but also of sociality (2022: 126). By encountering the temporality of ice as something more capricious and non-linear – as an agent of dynamic geologic change rather than declensionist climatological melt – the vast diversity of what ice does comes into view. Both solid and liquid, rock and water, land and sea, frozen and melted, eternal and ephemeral, stratigraphic and glitchy, ice keeps us glued within the possibility of multiplicity. It therefore reminds us that the geologic turn is towards not one Earth, but many Earths, that is best understood as able, and willing, to glitch.
Acknowledgements
This article grew out of research I conducted at the Smithsonian Institution, where I was a research fellow for four months in 2019. Thank you in particular to Pamela Henson, who guided my time in the archives there. Thanks also to my advisor at the University of Pennsylvania, Etienne Benson, whose input always improves my work; and to the Wolf Humanities Center forum on ‘Choice’, where this paper was workshopped in 2021. I am also indebted to the members of the Arctic Circle in 2017—particularly Himali Singh Soin—all of whom helped my thinking on ice evolve. And thanks also to my current colleagues on the Making Climate History project at Cambridge, where said thinking is evolving further. Finally, thanks to the thoughtful reviewers, whose comments and feedback were invaluable in strengthening this piece. The research behind this article was made possible through support from the Smithsonian Institution, the Linda Hall Library, the National Science Foundation, and the Wolf Humanities Center.
Notes
‘Martøya’ was a name given by the guides and crew of our ship to a newly exposed island; it will not be on any maps.
Of course, as the guides patiently reminded us, calving was not a sign of climate change – it was part of the glacial cycle through warm periods and cold.
There is a history of tension between geology and the study of non-terrestrial rocks and places. As plans were being made to send humans to the moon in the 1960s, scientists including Eugene Shoemaker pushed for astronauts to be trained in geologic methods. Others, such as Harold Urey, thought such training a complete waste of energy. The notion that ‘geology’ could be applied in space likewise shaped debates around nomenclature. Where those in favour of geology proposed ‘astrogeology’, those who did not think the geologic assumptions of the Earth made sense in space preferred the term ‘selenology’. See Shindell (2010) and Messeri (2016).
As I will explain shortly, in using viscosity I am building on Cristián Simonetti's work (2022).
Here I echo Julianne Yip's introduction to ‘Salt-ice worlds: an anthropology of sea ice’ (2019: 12–15).
The geologic turn is seen in a wide range of scholarship: work focused on energy and resource consumption, philosophical engagements with the non-human – and abiotic – as historical and social actors, and the growing field of what Klaus Dodd's calls the ‘ice humanities’ to name a few (Dodds and Sörlin 2022; Radin and Kowal 2017). Energy history and work in ‘energopolitics’, for example, consider both how societies consume energy and the uneven patterns through which fossil fuels have been extracted and monopolised. While carefully avoiding environmental determinism, scholars have effectively shown how the strata on which societies cluster matter (Malm 2016; Mitchell 2013). Similarly, recent work centred in political geology dives into the vertical territory of the planet to emphasise the ‘geo’ of geopolitics (Bobbette and Donovan2019; Bridge 2009; Daggett 2019). Such work shows how, as they move horizontally over the planet's surface, geologists are political actors while also arguing that, by realigning geopolitics to the vertical, the exploration and extraction of subsurface materials are political, too.
Uniformitarianism was the conception of geologic change promoted most notably by Charles Lyell and is often described, in perhaps oversimplified terms, as the direct contrast to catastrophism. Lyell did not coin the term – William Whewell did when reviewing Lyell's foundational text, Principles of Geology, in 1830. Nor did Lyell originate it: Principles was an explicit descendent of the work of James Hutton and John Playfair. Nevertheless, it was Lyell to whom the notion was most directly tied, as it was uniformitarianism that underpinned his entire theory of geologic change.
This is not to suggest that human impact on the planet should be dismissed or that claims that ‘the climate warms naturally, anyway’ were correct.
A complete, constantly updated list of Antarctic meteorites in the US collection can be found at: https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/antmet/us_clctn.cfm
For example, from 1963 to 1975 the Smithsonian ran a Prairie Meteorite Network, which pointed cameras at the heavens in an attempt to trace the falling rocks. While 334 fireballs were photographed in the air, only one was found on the land.
As geologist Ursula Marvin explains, ‘Isotopically, each meteorite serves as a timekeeper of at least three important dates in its history: the date when its parent body originally formed (its formation age), the length of time it has orbited through space (its cosmic-ray exposure age), and the time since it fell to Earth (its terrestrial age)’ (2002: 18).
Precisely how, and with what level of distortion, ice sheets flowed was still a subject of debate. See discussion of the ‘sandwich model’ in Dansgaard (2004).
The plethora of studies that could be conducted on the ice cores meant that there was always less ice core than necessary to meet demand.
This interpretation of strata was done by comparing the lithology of rock types and fossil evidence embedded in layers.
Smithsonian Institute Archives, Record Unit 7463, Edward L. Fireman Papers. Box 13, Folder 13. Correspondence 1981.
An estimated four meteorites fall to Earth each day. The majority land in the ocean and are lost. Those that fall on land are equally likely to be lost.
As of 2020, scientists had extracted blue ice from Antarctica that dates back 2.7 million years, 1.7 million years older than any previous deep cores.
Rather than an error in the system, a glitch is a means of dismantling gender and escaping fixity: to ‘glitch between new conceptions of bodies and selves’, as Russell puts it. Glitches can therefore enable glimpses outside of homogenous structures of gender, race, class and capitalism. While my adaptation of glitch does not engage as intimately with bodies and identity, it does follow Russell's call to ‘turn glitch on its ear’ and see such unconformities not as an error but as a possibility (Russell 2020: 50). I am indebted to conversations and collaborative writing projects with Himali Singh Soin, who brought Russell's notion of the glitch to my attention.
There are many excellent critiques of the ‘species-level thinking’ of the Anthropocene, such as those by Crist (2013), Davis and Todd (2017) and Moore (2016). Recent responses to (and resignations from) the Anthropocene Working Group likewise speak to such concerns. In critiquing the temporality of geology in particular, Kathryn Yusoff articulates how the very concept of deep time has been used to dehumanise certain groups of humans. She writes, ‘Locked into a belatedness in becoming human enough in relation to the ideal (white) humanist subject, the spatialising of time along a vertical line is used as a mechanism to deny juridical rights, wherein Whiteness becomes the achievement of one's temporal identity in geologic time’ (Yusoff 2018: 77).
The ‘Arctic sublime’ was defined by Chauncy Loomis in 1977. This perception of the poles – as places where individuals encountered the limits of human agency and were overwhelmed by the ‘emptiness’ and vastness of Arctic nature – grew from the broader concept of the sublime defined by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). The problematic nature of the notion (not least in that it erases indigenous populations and romanticises complex ecosystems) has been explored by a range of art historians, environmental historians and literary scholars.
References
Achermann, D. 2020. ‘Vertical glaciology: the second discovery of the third dimension in climate research’, Centaurus 62: 1–24.
Antonello, A. and M. Carey 2017. ‘Ice cores and the temporalities of the global environment’, Environmental Humanities 9: 181–203.
Asimov, I. 1981. ‘The white background’, reprinted in Change! Seventy-one glimpses of the future, 124–126. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bobbette, A. and A. Donovan (eds.) 2019. Political geology: active stratigraphies and the making of life. Cham: Springer International.
Bridge G, 2009. ‘The Hole World: Scales and Spaces of Extraction’, New Geographies 2:43 – 48.
Burke, E. 1757. A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. London: R. and J. Dodsley.
Cassidy, W. 2003. Meteorites, ice, and Antarctica: a personal account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cassidy, W. and I. Whillans 1990. ‘Summary of technical sessions’, in LPI Technical Report Number 90-03, Workshop on Antarctic Meteorite Stranding Surfaces. Texas: Lunar and Planetary Institute.
Chakrabarty, D. 2009. ‘The climate of history: four theses’, Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222.
Clark, N. 2011. Inhuman nature: sociable life on a dynamic planet. London: SAGE.
Clark, N. 2017. ‘Politics of strata’, Theory, Culture & Society 34: 211–231.
Clark, N., A. Gormally and H. Tuffen 2018. ‘Speculative volcanology’, Environmental Humanities 10: 273–294.
Clark N. and K. Yusoff 2017. ‘Geosocial Formations in the Anthropocene’, Theory, Culture & Society 34: 3–23.
Crist, E. 2013. ‘On the poverty of our nomenclature’, Environmental Humanities 3: 129–147.
Crozaz, G. 1988. ‘Deducing past climate’, in LPI Technical Report No. 90-03, Workshop on Antarctic Meteorite Stranding Surfaces. 11. Texas: Lunar and Planetary Institute.
Cruikshank, J. 2005. Do glaciers listen? Local knowledge, colonial encounters, and social imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Daggett, C. N. 2019. The birth of energy: fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dansgaard, W. 2004. Frozen annals: Greenland ice sheet research. Odder, Denmark: Narayana Press.
Davis, H. and Z. Todd 2017. ‘On the importance of a date, or decolonizing the Anthropocene’, ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies 16: 761–780.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1994. What is philosophy? London: Verso.
Dodds, K. and S. Sörlin (eds.) 2022. Ice humanities: living, working, and thinking in a melting world. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Haraway, D. 2016. ‘Tentacular thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, E-Flux 75.
Hastrup, K. 2013. ‘The ice as argument: topographical mementos in the High Arctic’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 31: 51–67.
Kaalund, NKL. 2017. ‘A Frosty Disagreement: John Tyndall, James David Forbes, and the Early Formation of the X-Club’, Annals of Science 74 (4): 282–298.
Malm, A. 2016. Fossil capital: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. New York: Verso Books.
Loomis, C. 1977. The Arctic sublime, in U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (eds.), Nature and the Victorian imagination, 95–112. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Lyell, C. 1830. Principles of geology. London: John Murray.
Marvin, U. 1980. Ohio State Bonoker lecture, ‘New light on earth’, 24 April. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 13-060, Box 2, Folder 20.
Marvin, U. 1981. Lecture notes for ‘The impact of meteorites on geological thought’ given at the National Air and Space Museum, 21 March. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 13-060, Box 2, Folder 9.
Marvin, U. 1983. ‘Exxon production research lecture’. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 13-060, Box 4, Folder 10.
Marvin, U. 2002. Earth to planetary science, in D. Oldroyd (ed.), The earth inside out: some major contributions to geology in the twentieth century, 17–57. Bath: The Geological Society Publishing House.
Mason, B. 1966. Principles of geochemistry, 3rd edn. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
McPhee, J. 1982. Basin and range. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Messeri, L. 2016. Placing outer space: an earthly ethnography of other worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mitchell, T. 2013. Carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil. New York: Verso.
Moore, J. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Radin, J. and E. Kowal (eds.) 2017. Cryopolitics: frozen life in a melting world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Raffles, H. 2020. The book of unconformities: speculations on lost time. New York: Pantheon.
Rose, D. B. 2012. ‘Multispecies knots of ethical time’, Environmental Philosophy 9: 127–140.
Rudwick, M. 2005. Bursting the limits of time: the reconstruction of geohistory in the age of revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Russell, L. 2020. Glitch feminism: a manifesto. New York: Verso.
Sepkoski, D. 2017. The earth as archive: contingency, narrative, and the history of life, in L. Daston (ed.), Science in the archives: pasts, presents, futures, 53–84. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Shindell, M. 2010. ‘Domesticating the planets: instruments and practices in the development of planetary geology’, Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science 4: 191–230.
Simonetti, C. 2022. ‘Viscosity in matter, life and sociality: the case of glacial ice’, Theory, Culture & Society 39: 111–130.
Singh Soin, H. and A. Rider 2021. Healing from meteorites, in Sensing nature, 30–37. Montreal: Momenta Biennale.
Yip, J. 2019. ‘Salt-ice worlds: an anthropology of sea ice’, PhD Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, McGill University.
Yip, J. 2022. ‘Sea ice out of time: reckoning with environmental change’, Time & Society 31: 561–583.
Yoshida, M. 2010. ‘Discovery of the Yamato meteorites in 1969’, Polar Science 3: 272–284.
Yusoff, K. 2018. A billion black Anthropocenes or none. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Yusoff, K. 2019. ‘Geologic realism’, Social Text 37: 1–26.
