This special dossier explores how different understandings of glaciers in the Andes are placed under tension and transformed during the planetary crisis caused by collective human action and defined by irreversible alterations of earthly processes. Since at least the Industrial Revolution, these alterations have been driven by the carbon-intensive economies of the Global North, historically dependent on extractivism and its colonial roots, which spanned the Global South, including Latin America and the Caribbean. Glaciers are particularly sensitive to such planetary changes, and their melting carries enormous social implications. They hold the largest reserves of fresh water on the planet; more than two billion people rely on them for domestic use and agriculture, especially during dry seasons. These reserves help balance the hydrological cycle, allowing biodiversity to endure seasonally. Glaciers also act as climate regulators: Their white surfaces reflect more sunlight than any other surface on the planet, and they regulate sea level by storing water above ground. Thus, glacier melting driven by collective human action alters Earth processes that directly affect society.
In only a few decades, the view of glaciers has shifted from vestiges of past geological times to casualties of anthropogenic global warming. Initially, as the theory of the ice ages was formulated in the mid-nineteenth century, ice formations were associated with ancient climatic cycles prior to the arrival of humans on Earth. Yet since the turn of the century, glacier melting has become a distinctive icon of global warming in the public imagination. In contrast to ice on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and elsewhere in the universe, ice on Earth is close to its melting point—a reality that scientists have come to appreciate only recently, as they seek to understand the singularities of our planet and the presence of life amid anthropogenic climate change. Fifty percent of all glaciers on Earth are currently projected to disappear before the end of the century as a result of global warming. In response, the United Nations declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation and established March 21 as World Day for Glaciers. This new awareness has resonated across Latin America. In Chile, home to 80 percent of all Latin American glaciers, government authorities ratified the commemoration after activists and NGOs mobilized to celebrate the first World Day for Glaciers in Santiago in March 2025.
Given this dire scenario, it becomes increasingly difficult to think of glaciers as locked in a past prior to the emergence of culture. Glacial history—traditionally tied to geological scales that transcend human action—is now unfolding on scales close to human experience, as humans become the cause of glacial melting. Glaciers thus increasingly throw what is past into question and demand that scholars attempt to historicize their loss, addressing the diverse ways in which societies have conceived of them and have mobilized to confront the consequences of their disappearance. Correspondingly, the possibilities for intervening in glacial history through protective laws, conservation efforts, new infrastructure, or even technological manipulation raise new ethical and political questions about whether humans can slow down, prevent, or perhaps even reverse geological processes that seem stubbornly irreversible and uncontrollable. To date, however, the relationship between society and the transformations of glaciers, past and present, remains understudied both globally and across the region.
The impossibility of divorcing geological from human scales appears to be emblematic of these critical times, as suggested by recent debates on the concept of the Anthropocene, a term introduced to name a new geological epoch in which humans have become the leading cause of planetary change. Discussions across the sciences and humanities about the existence and political implications of this epoch have often been framed as an invitation to blur traditional boundaries between nature and culture, and more precisely, between the Earth’s deep time and the instantaneity of contemporary modern life. Arguably, more than any other substance on Earth, glaciers are the thing of these critical times; the matter of planetary change. They emerge as both natural and social, simultaneously materializing the long- and short-term scales of Earth and human history, respectively. Although often narrated as if eternal, glaciers’ accelerated melting now renders them ephemeral. In the current human-driven ecological crisis, glaciers matter crucially.
Indeed, humans and glaciers—perpetrator and victim—seem to share a common fate in the ecological crisis. Both run the risk of becoming abstracted into universal phenomena, irrespective of the circumstances in which ecological harm is created and suffered. Despite the promise of establishing a new dialogue between the earth sciences and the humanities, scholars have noted that the Anthropocene has largely been framed as the product of a universal human species. This narrative tends to dilute environmental responsibility and disempower communities affected by global warming. Similarly, as science turns glacial changes into proxies for models of global warming, the ecological and societal implications of their transformations are often overlooked. It is somewhat easier to think of glaciers as thermometers of a global trend than as victims of local extractivism. Understood primarily as indexes of climate change operating at a global scale—which tends to be associated more closely with natural processes—glacial melting is often elevated to a narrative located everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
Historically, such a detached view relates to how modern science has embraced values of objectivity through distant observation. It also corresponds with how nation-states have historically managed their territories and subjects from synoptic or bird’s-eye perspectives, aided by cartography and often located in administrative centers far removed from affected territories. It further aligns with a passive understanding of glaciers, dominated by modern physics and chemistry, sciences that enable centralized monitoring of glacial transformations through satellite imagery. Such a passive view excludes more complex and heterogeneous organic and social dimensions, which require in situ investigation. Among scientists, including at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other institutions dedicated to studying global warming, glaciers continue to be conceptualized in physicochemical terms as frozen water that deforms under gravity. This conception reflects a disciplinary hierarchy between hard and soft forms of knowledge, and contrasts with situated, livelier, and more intimate forms of knowledge around glaciers, including those cultivated by Indigenous peoples. As some of the articles in this dossier show, in societies in proximity to glaciers, glaciers are often narrated as vital entities that are crucial to social life and worthy of veneration—therefore, as more than frozen water.
A new conception of glaciers has been emerging slowly within Western science, one that challenges strict separations between inert and living matter in glaciology. This conception has arisen alongside the technological developments that enabled the measurement and modelling of global warming and led to the formulation of the Anthropocene concept. It is related to the emergence of Earth system science, a field established after World War II, partly through the technological innovations of the Space Race and the comparative study of planets within and beyond the solar system. This transdisciplinary field conceives of Earth as an interrelated and self-regulating whole, thanks to organic life, of which the so-called cryosphere is a critical subsystem. From the Greek kryos (κρύος), meaning “cold,” “frost,” or “ice,” and sphaira (σφαῖρα), meaning “ball” or “globe,” the cryosphere comprises all frozen regions of the planet, including glaciers. Searching for and studying ice formations across the solar system has been critical for theorizing the emergence of life on Earth and for formulating the idea that our planet operates as a self-regulating whole, largely thanks to the appearance of organic life in Earth’s history. Contrary to the traditional view of ice as a solid substance hostile to life or ideal for its suspension, astrobiology has demonstrated that cryospheric formations can be habitable environments that support complex ecosystems.
Embracing the tensions and transformations of the multiple understandings—past and present—that surround glaciers has serious implications for their future in Latin America, a region where glacial melting has functioned not only as an early warning system of global climate change but also as a signal of the intense socioecological conflicts that lie ahead. The region has been affected not only by fast- and slow-moving disasters typically attributed to global warming, such as glacial lake outburst floods and water scarcity, but also by the local effects of extractivism, particularly mining, which has involved both the destruction and pollution of glaciers. The controversies resulting from these glacial transformations are expected to increase in number and intensify in magnitude in the coming decades, especially as the international push for an energy transition to a zero-carbon economy is projected to exponentially increase the demand for critical minerals abundant in the region, including copper, lithium, and rare metals—some of which lie buried beneath glaciers.
In this introduction to the first interdisciplinary dossier in Latin American Research Review specially dedicated to the glaciers of the Andes, we argue that addressing the environmental challenges and conflicts surrounding the multiple ways of knowing glaciers requires understanding the paradoxical ubiquity of ice, while moving beyond the transcendental predicament of the Anthropocene. Natural yet social, eternal yet ephemeral, global yet provincial, inert yet alive, glacial ice is a substance essential to think with when confronting the challenges of the current planetary crisis. Understanding this ubiquity, we contend, requires challenging the colonial, gendered, and extractivist frameworks through which Western knowledge has traditionally approached the study and governance of glaciers (and of nature more broadly). This dossier invites readers to apprehend the ubiquity of ice while remaining situated within particular contexts and territories across the Andes, where imaginaries surrounding the past and future of glaciers have evolved—and continue to evolve—historically.
Making Andean glaciers matter
Recent artistic interventions around the world attest to the urgent reality of ice melting, illustrating how the apparent solidity of glaciers is disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Cecilia Vicuña’s performance Hielo sacro is an example. Presented in March 2025 during the first celebration of World Day for Glaciers in Santiago, Chile, the performance connected participants to the El Plomo glacier—the only one still visible from the city—through a melting ice block placed in the atrium of the National Fine Arts Museum. As Vicuña extended a gigantic wool yarn from the block to the nearby Mapocho River, into which El Plomo drains, participants were invited to touch and feel the ice (Vicuña and Castro Jorquera Reference Vicuña, Castro Jorquera, Simonetti, Barandiarán and Ragas2026).
Similarly, scientists, activists, and local authorities have begun to mourn glaciers, using ritual to unsettle established routines of value and attention. Since 2019, they have held funerals for disappeared glaciers in Iceland, Switzerland, and Oregon (Howe and Boyer Reference Howe and Boyer2024; Provant and Carey Reference Provant and Carey2022). In Latin America, the demise of Venezuela’s Pico Humboldt and Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glaciers have captured global media attention (Palomo et al. Reference Palomo, Lana, Rabatel and Dangles2025). How to mourn a glacier across Latin America’s diverse ecosystems, from the tropics to the dry Andes, remains open to experimentation.
Alongside these interventions and the sense of urgency they convey, a new field of attribution science has emerged, offering to trace the influence of human activity on the natural world so as to understand, among other things, why glaciers are disappearing so rapidly (Provant and Carey Reference Provant and Carey2022). Studies have demonstrated how anthropogenic warming has intensified ice loss in New Zealand and Peru. For instance, shrinking glaciers in Peru have left behind the expanding Lake Palcacocha, which threatens to flood tens of thousands of people downstream, as has already occurred in the region (Carey Reference Carey2010). Since scientists confirmed that this retreat is primarily caused by human-driven climate change, the danger is not merely a natural hazard but a matter of human responsibility. This scientific evidence has already received judicial scrutiny: A Peruvian farmer brought a case against the German energy company RWE, arguing that since the company is responsible for nearly half a percent of historical global emissions, it should shoulder an equivalent portion of the cost of securing Lake Palcacocha. Although the court dismissed the farmer’s specific claim, it found that companies can be held responsible for their greenhouse gas emissions—opening the way to new forms of litigation that link corporate global emissions to local climate risks (Walker-Crawford Reference Walker-Crawford2023).
These efforts stand in stark contrast to older images of glaciers as fixed backdrops to social life. For nearly three centuries, glaciers appeared as threats, laboratories, spaces for recreation, or destinations for encountering the sublime—yet almost always as part of a relatively stable natural landscape (Carey Reference Carey2007). For scientists at the time, glaciers were static vestiges of the Earth’s vast and slowly changing history. According to the official narrative, glacial retreat across Eurasia at the end of the Pleistocene enabled the emergence of great civilizations. Sustained by the unusual climatic stability of the Holocene, the development of agriculture in deglaciated fertile valleys unleashed a complex civilizing ascent extending from Eurasia to the Americas. Mountain and polar cryospheres, holding the longest climatic records of the Earth’s past, came to be seen as remnants of a fixed past that preceded written history that began after humans adopted sedentary lives (Simonetti and Ingold Reference Simonetti and Ingold2018).
These Eurocentric narratives connecting glacial and human evolution intersect with those of the peoples and nations of the Andean region. One example is Chile, whose name has been interpreted since the Spanish conquest as related to the Quichua chilli, meaning cold. Nineteenth-century paintings depicting the founding of the nation typically feature glaciers in the background, providing the new nation with a seemingly firm and unchanging setting for its self-legitimation (Peliowski and Valdés Reference Peliowski and Valdés2014). This image became globally known when, in 1992, the Chilean government transported an iceberg from Antarctica to a major international fair in Seville. The iceberg, kept inside a gigantic freezer in Chile’s pavilion, stood as a national symbol intended to emphasize the strength and coldness of character, in line with theories linking social evolution to climate—from classical antiquity through to the twentieth century (Hulme Reference Hulme2016).
This gesture symbolically aligned Chileans with developed societies in the Global North living in cold climates, while distancing the country from less developed nations in the region located in the tropics (Dümmer Reference Dümmer, Simonetti, Barandiarán and Ragas2026; see also Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart Reference Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart2022). Chile’s ice pavilion contrasts starkly with Hielo sacro, described earlier, particularly in their respective emphases on the solidity and liquidity—or permanence and impermanence—of ice. Despite advancing global warming, nationalist gestures attached to ice and cold continue to resurface in the region. An example is a glacier-inspired costume worn by Chile’s candidate for Miss Universe 2025, Inna Moll, also inspired by Torres del Paine National Park—Chile’s most famous Patagonian tourist attraction. Another is Argentina’s new national identity card, released in 2023. It includes an image of Perito Moreno, another iconic tourist attraction located on the eastern side of the Southern Patagonian Icefield, the largest glaciated region in South America. But tensions caused by global warming are never far. Within the Southern Patagonian Icefield, nearly sixty kilometers of the border between Chile and Argentina remain undefined. Melting ice is expected to intensify international border conflicts in the region (Parvex Reference Parvex2022; Manzano Reference Manzano2019; Yunis Reference Yunis, Simonetti, Barandiarán and Ragas2026).
The transition of ice from eternal to ephemeral resonates with the predicament of the Anthropocene, particularly humanity’s instantaneous burning of carbon, stored in fossils over millennia. The Anthropocene compels scholars across the sciences and humanities to simultaneously socialize the geological and geologize the social (Clark and Yusoff Reference Clark and Yusoff2017; Crutzen Reference Crutzen2002). In this context, glacial and human times have become hard to distinguish (Simonetti Reference Simonetti2019). Once conceived as fixed repositories of the Earth’s deep history, glaciers have become, according to environmental historian Mark Carey (Reference Carey2007), “endangered species” in the public imagination (also Schmidt Reference Schmidt2021). This has triggered what historian of science Sverker Sörlin (Reference Sörlin and Evengard2015) describes as a cryo-historical moment, in which a subject normally understood as beyond the jurisdiction of historians—glacial dynamics—has suddenly entered the heart of the humanities. The titles of recent edited volumes engaged with the social and political dimensions of ice loss reflect this clearly, with expressions such as cryopolitics (Radin and Kowal Reference Radin and Kowal2017; also Bravo and Rees Reference Bravo and Rees2006), ice humanities (Dodds and Sörlin Reference Dodds and Sörlin2022), and cold humanities (Ruiz et al. Reference Ruiz, Schönach and Shields2024).
Sensing melting ice remotely
The merging of social and geological times triggered by the Anthropocene proposal has opened unprecedented dialogues across the sciences and humanities. However, the push to advance this new epoch risks dissolving what humanities scholars and social scientists have traditionally studied—namely, cultural heterogeneity. Typically, the Anthropocene is framed as resulting from the actions of a single species (humankind), rather than from specific cultures within the pluralism of humans that have existed over time and space (Bonneuil Reference Bonneuil, Hamilton, Bonneuil and Gemenne2015). Scholars have proposed alternative names in response, such as Capitalocene (Moore Reference Moore2015) and Eurocene (Grove Reference Grove and McCarthy2017), to emphasize that responsibility for the environmental crisis is not shared equally—it lies historically with carbon-intensive economies located in the Global North (also Haraway Reference Haraway2016). The species narrative advanced by Earth scientists fails socially, as it remains morally indifferent to the historical circumstances that shape the crisis. For social scientists and humanities scholars, the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene is nowhere to be found.
A similar logic of abstraction underlies the planetary view of Earth system science from which the Anthropocene concept was initially formulated (Morgan and Simonetti Reference Morgan, Simonetti, O’Gorman, San Martín, Carey and Swart2023). This planetary view offers a much-needed posthuman perspective for confronting the environmental crisis, as it challenges the exceptionalism that the Western intellectual tradition has historically granted to humans in evolution. Yet, much like the Anthropocene concept, the planetary logic risks diluting moral responsibility, as it is often portrayed as indifferent to human concerns. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2019, 28), for instance, writes that the planetary “not only out-scales the human but also … has nothing moral or ethical or normative about it” (also Spivak Reference Spivak and Spivak2003). The planetary view, according to Chakrabarty, dismantles the logic of sustainability embraced by the United Nations and other global organizations, which expects human ingenuity to preserve economic growth as usual through new technologies and stewardship. The planetary view calls instead to address Earth’s habitability, a phenomenon dependent on the precarious balance of organic life, which is again indifferent to human needs and desires.
The historical development of the technologies that enabled the comparative study of planets resonates with this risk of diluting moral responsibility. These advances allowed scientists to observe Earth distantly as an interconnected whole. In the public imagination this planetary perspective materialized with the iconic photographs of Earth taken from outer space by NASA’s Apollo program, named after the masculine Greek god (Cosgrove Reference Cosgrove1994). According to the philosopher Hannah Arendt (Reference Arendt1958), this view consummated the trajectory of modern science, initiated at the start of the scientific revolution with the invention of the telescope, which invited contemplation of our place in the universe from afar. Objectivity in this trajectory became associated with vision, optics, and remote observation, which, in the words of feminist scholar Donna Haraway (Reference Haraway1988, 589), corresponds to a “divine gaze,” a “view from above, from nowhere” (also Szerszynski and Clark Reference Szerszynski and Clark2021).
A detached understanding of the planet’s transformations also informs how citizens learn about the fate of glaciers today. For urban dwellers—who currently account for more than 50 percent of the world’s population—glacial change is often observed at a distance. They often rely on visual content produced by dominant media and technologies: optical instruments like repeat photography, which has come to dominate the Western imagination of glacier melt under global warming (Inkpen Reference Inkpen2024). Few citizens, including those tasked with making policies that will affect the fate of the planet, have the opportunity to visit a glacier, let alone come to know one intimately. School children, like many adults, learn about the changing cryosphere but rarely, if ever, are immersed in it. Instead, they, like most of us, learn through visual content projected on screens—denying us the full range of our senses.
This distant relationship with glaciers is reinforced in how climate science currently monitors glacier change, relying largely on satellite imagery so as to turn local measurements into proxies for global warming models—a view corresponding historically to how nation-states, including colonial empires, have managed their territories, riches, and subjects centrally and synoptically, powered by cartography (Scott Reference Scott1998). This move may be responsible for transforming glaciers into iconic thermometers of global warming. Glaciologists and climate scientists have determined the effects of global warming on glaciers without visiting every glacier, thanks to the ability to inspect the global relationship between temperature rise and ice melt remotely. This detached view of glaciers shapes how glaciers are monitored in Latin America. As Lana and coauthors show (this dossier), scientists who worked on the Argentine National Glacier Inventory privilege the production of objective data for global climate models over other goals, such as understanding the local and political implications of glacier melt and destruction. Put differently, while scientists seek to upscale their data to international networks for the study of global warming, politicians and environmental groups hope to downscale scientific findings to the local circumstances of specific glacier basins to protect them, safeguard community needs and interests, and check the advance of the mining industry.
The publication of Argentina’s National Glacier Inventory prompted significant controversies, in part due to tensions generated by these contrasting scalar practices (Carr and Lempert Reference Carr and Lempert2016; Hastrup Reference Hastrup2013). Contests over how to define the minimum size of a glacier under local and international standards led to the prosecution of Ricardo Villalba, former director of Argentina’s National Glacier Inventory, for example (also Rojas and Wagner Reference Rojas, Wagner, Miraglia and França2021; Martín and Healey Reference Martín, Healey and Merlinsky2020). Moreover, the detached or distant view underlying objective assessments of glacier retreat is often in profound temporal disarray with glaciers’ actual transformations. As Barandiarán (Reference Barandiarán2020) has argued regarding environmental impact assessments (EIAs) in the context of mining in Chile, objective advice from expert consultants often arrives too late, offering a fixed image—or photograph—frozen in time that fails to capture the ongoing transformation of the cryosphere and the socioecological complexities resulting from human interventions.
Knowing ice ecologies intimately
Knowing glaciers intimately has historically been the faculty of a few—mostly Indigenous and local communities living at high altitudes and latitudes, whose ways of life have traditionally developed in close relation to glacier transformations. The knowledge these societies have cultivated, largely based on reciprocity and respect, has long contrasted with the detachment often characteristic of Western science. The work of anthropologists Julie Cruikshank (Reference Cruikshank2005) and Karin Gagné (Reference Gagné2019) with Tlingit and Athabascan communities in North America and with Ladakhis in India, respectively, illustrates this contrast. Similar contrasts have been broadly noted by humanities scholars studying communities living in Andean mountain regions (Bacigalupo et al. Reference Bacigalupo, Guillermo Salas, Paerregaard, Drew, Gagné and Gergan2021; Ceruti Reference Ceruti2020; Cadena Reference Cadena2015; Simonetti et al. Reference Simonetti, Barandiarán and Ragas2026). Lyons (this dossier) provides another arresting example as she analyses efforts by field glaciologists to open their ontological assumptions to Mapuche understandings of the cryosphere at Ruka Pillán volcano in central Chile. Cryosphere scientists are typically trained in modern ideals of objectivity, with the result that traditional knowledge, including that of Indigenous and local communities, is rendered anecdotal (O’Reilly Reference O’Reilly2016). This bias persists even among field glaciologists, whose reliance on sensory experience sets them apart in practice from scientists trained in remote sensing or climate modelling (also Simonetti Reference Simonetti2019). Overall, in environmental science, the global corresponds to nature and objectivity and the local to culture and subjectivity (also Tsing Reference Tsing2005). In gaining an objective view of glaciers, glacier science seems to lose a feeling for the socioecological singularities of each glacier—a reality that younger generations of glaciologists in the region, aware of the planetary crisis, are working to change, as Lyons shows (this dossier).
Historically led by male scientists—many arriving from low latitudes and altitudes across Europe—glaciology in the Andes developed initially in line with colonial ambitions to dominate a passive nature and its Indigenous inhabitants. Hines (this dossier) illustrates this dynamic with an analysis of the late nineteenth-century interactions between European explorers and Aymara communities in Bolivia. Traces of this relation of dominance over the cryosphere extend well into the twentieth century. A notable example is the language used by Louis Lliboutry—regarded as a father of modern glaciology in the region—at the time of publication of his influential book, Snow and Ice of Chile: Foundations of Glaciology. Lliboutry frequently described the study of the cryosphere as an act of conquering a passive nature. The 2019 tribute volume by Marc Turrel, The Man Who Deciphered Glaciers: Louis Lliboutry, perpetuates this image when it describes Lliboutry as having “conquered” a passive cryosphere by deciphering the history of glaciers. Scientific knowledge of the cryosphere, which developed alongside mountaineering and a fascination with high vistas, has historically depended on the belief that objectivity rests on masculine displays of physical exertion (Hevly Reference Hevly1996; Carey et al. Reference Carey, Jackson, Antonello and Rushing2016; Araya Reference Araya, Simonetti, Barandiarán and Ragas2026). This mingling of intellect and muscularity—purportedly required to dominate a passive nature—is embodied by the cover image of Turrell’s volume, which shows Lliboutry climbing a nearly vertical glacier wall with crampons and an ice axe. Correspondingly, cryosphere science continues to be male dominated, as the article by Edilia Jaque Castillo and coauthors (this dossier) shows for the region.
The distant monitoring of the cryosphere that dominates contemporary glaciology described above resonates with a traditional physicochemical view of glaciers, according to which they are nothing more than water in solid state. Leading organizations involved in studying climate change and its impacts on ice melt—including the US Geological Survey, the World Meteorological Organization, and Chile’s National Glacier Inventory—define glaciers as perennial frozen water that deforms under gravity. This definition matches the widespread view of ice as solid, passive, and inert that most children in Western education learn early on, when they are taught to distinguish categorically between states of matter using steam from kettles, tap water, and artificial ice from household freezers. More broadly, people in modern societies have historically associated ice with de-animation—an image that, according to historian Joanna Radin (Reference Radin2019), gained prominence with the invention of artificial refrigeration, which enabled biologists to cryo-preserve blood and tissue and fueled imaginaries of ice suspending life outside time.
This understanding is, however, challenged by a new cryobiology that has emerged from the same technologies that enabled the comparative study of planets, as discussed by Simonetti and Purcell (this dossier). Biologists studying the possibility of life outside our planet have turned toward natural ice formations within the Earth’s cryosphere (as opposed to the artificial cryopreservation processes examined by Radin). They have reached the remarkable conclusion that ice is not opposed to life but can fundamentally harbor it. Cryosphere ice formations have been found to contain immense microbial biodiversity from all domains of life, as well as algae, worms, and other animal species, many of them endemic to icy environments (Boetius et al. Reference Boetius, Anesio, Deming, Mikucki and Rapp2015). Contrary to the idea of suspension that traditionally dominates Western imaginaries of ice—largely forged from a mammalian standpoint—glaciers constitute habitable environments for many nonhuman species. This view, paradoxically born from the same detached cosmic perspective that gave rise to the planetary view, resonates strongly with Indigenous people’s intimate knowledge of the cryosphere within and beyond the region. The vitality that biology now attributes to ice echoes—though from contrasting angles (Simonetti and Purcell, this dossier)—how, for traditional Indigenous societies of high latitudes and altitudes, cryosphere ice formations have long been understood as nurturing environments (also Gagné and Drew Reference Gagné and Drew2024; Simonetti Reference Simonetti2022).
Unfortunately, this shift from inert to vital conceptions of the cryosphere has not yet fully reshaped glacier protection and monitoring—as geoengineering proposals for mitigating the effects of global warming dramatically show (Simonetti and Purcell, this dossier). These geoengineering proposals reflect a physicochemical view of ice that corresponds with a widespread framing of glaciers as a frozen water resource (also Fox et al. Reference Fox, Ernesto Schwartz-Marin, Palmer and Harrison2024). A key factor delaying the incorporation of an organic perspective on ice is that satellite technology used to monitor the Earth’s cryosphere is designed to map its physical distribution. Monitoring its organic complexity would require teams of cryobiologists studying glaciers in situ—with their senses open to challenging established conventions—in line with how Indigenous cryosphere societies have cultivated their knowledge across generations. Knowing that planetary habitability is at stake in these troubled times (sensu Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2019), perhaps we should not forget that cryoecologies may hold important lessons for the future that are worth preserving. The future of these icy ecosystems is, however, bleak in light of the cumulative effects of global warming. In this dire scenario, society cannot remain morally indifferent to glacier melt. Addressing the disappearance of glaciers is imperative: communities and the ecosystems to which they belong will suffer the effects differently depending on their political and economic power.
Analyses of the diverse ways in which glacier change is both affected by and affects society must assist in assigning geopolitical responsibility for the climate crisis. In South America, the Anthropocene has meant neo-extractivism: a neoliberal strategy advanced at the turn of the century alongside global trade and progressive governments across the region, based on the mass extraction and exportation of natural resources to fund social programs and national development—regardless of the often catastrophic consequences for Indigenous and local communities and the environment (Svampa Reference Svampa2019; Gudynas Reference Gudynas2009; Martínez Novo Reference Martínez Novo2021). Funded by multinational corporations, buttressed by free trade treaties, and coupled with permissive legislation from political elites, these policies have continued development patterns rooted in the colonial practices that gave rise to the Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin Reference Lewis and Maslin2015; also Davis and Todd Reference Davis and Todd2017).
The dossier
This special dossier emerges from an event organized in August 2022 in Santiago, Chile, that opened a dialogue on past and present controversies surrounding Andean glaciers to contribute to discussions on their protection. On the first day, we shared with one another much of the multidisciplinary research that appears in this dossier, to reflect on the changing ways glaciers are being imagined in the region. On the second day, we visited the small village of El Alfalfal, just outside Santiago and downstream from dozens of glaciers that feed the Maipo River—the hydrological lifeline for more than seven million Chileans and thousands of agricultural fields. From El Alfalfal, an energy company now runs a hydroelectric project that diverts glacial runoff through underground turbines before returning the now-turbid water to the Maipo. Both the event and this publication are part of a three-year project funded by the Chilean Agency for Research and Development (ANID, 2022–2025), which we led, titled Irreversible Returns: A Study on Glaciology and Glacial Geoengineering in Chile in the Context of the Anthropocene. Our overall objective was to think about the material and temporal paradoxes that have emerged from efforts to protect glaciers in the region in a context of global warming.Footnote 1 The articles in this dossier, including this introduction, draw on these experiences. A closing epilogue—written by historian Mark Carey, internationally renowned for his extensive work on glaciers in South America, particularly Peru—will further situate this dossier around the cryopolitics of what it means to advance glacier justice in times of planetary crisis.
Glaciers challenge our sense of “pastness” because of their simultaneous agencies as shapers of the landscape, archives of the past, backdrops to civilization, reservoirs of water, and, increasingly, as endangered species whose debris confronts us with a time either lost or on the verge of tipping due to historically contingent human action. Anthropologists and historians have examined the debris left by multiple rounds of development: Indigenous civilizations, empires, colonialism, state-led development, and neoliberalism. Through this work, we have become familiar with industrial waste, infrastructural and architectural ruins, desiccated riverbeds, and deforestation, as well as the rituals, names, and laws used to conserve their memory. But glaciers—traditionally conceived as part of a pristine and inaccessible natural landscape—do not occupy this same space. Altitude, freezing temperatures, ice, steepness, and wind have largely kept public scrutiny at a distance. By historicizing loss and memory, scholars have produced less triumphant histories that locate authority and assign responsibility. How, then, can we transform the loss and memory of glaciers into something that matters, against the erasures of the Anthropocene’s grand narrative and knowing that glacial retreat is now understood to coincide with the start and end of the Holocene—or, to put it differently, with the emergence and potential termination of civilization as we know it? Our Western, modern ancestors would likely be shocked to learn that today we mourn when a glacier passes. How can glaciers be historicized—situated socially and politically in particular territories—knowing they are vital to both humans and non-human beings who live in these habitable ecosystems?
This dossier takes up these questions through five articles framed by this introduction and an epilogue, produced by an interdisciplinary group of scholars working in and from the Andes. Glaciers of the South American Andes sustain millions of human and nonhuman lives across tropical and arid zones and at high and low altitudes. Their runoff feeds mighty rivers and smaller ones, on which the region’s agriculture depends; and like their host region, these glaciers have long been contested sites of Indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial projects. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dossier specially dedicated to examining the geosocial transformations of South American glaciers, with contributions on Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and the wider region. Collectively, the articles examine the trials, tribulations, and contestations provoked by efforts to conserve glaciers or cope with their current loss, as well as the contrasting colonial and gendered heritage through which glaciers have traditionally been studied.
One contribution—written by the anthropologists Sofía Lana and Leticia Saldi; the glaciologist and coordinator of Argentina’s Glacier Inventory, Laura Zalazar; and the environmental historian Facundo Rojas—focuses on Argentina’s first-of-its-kind glacier protection law and accompanying glacier inventory. Though celebrated as a major environmental victory when approved in 2010, nothing about the law’s implementation has gone as expected. Instead, fractures among glaciologists, activists, industry, and government officials have led to litigation and conflict. Writing about Chile, anthropologist Kristina Lyons examines the recent emergence of an independent panel of experts working to decolonize glaciology and support a meaningful glacier protection law that counters private interests. The efforts Lyons and Lana and coauthors analyze stand in contrast to those in Bolivia examined by environmental historian Sarah Hines, who traces nineteenth-century colonial confrontations between male European explorers, paceño elites of the capital city, and Aymara groups in the Cordillera Real during the establishment of modern glaciology. Feminist glaciologists Edilia Jaque, Ana Huaico-Malhue, Ana Hernández-Duarte, Marion San Juan Díaz, and María José Herrera-Ossandón complement this contrast with an analysis of slow-changing gender relations in glaciology that explores how rebalancing gender might shape knowledge production about glaciers in the Andes. The final article, by anthropologist Cristián Simonetti and environmental historian Fernando Purcell, examines historical and ongoing proposals to geoengineer ice in Chile to sustain or create glaciers artificially—efforts that operate with brutal disregard for the glacier biodiversity revealed by contemporary cryosphere biology. Together these articles offer a unique perspective on what it may mean to protect glaciers in an age of extinction.
Today, glaciers have become both victims of the ecological crisis and emblems of the environmental agenda (Orlove et al. Reference Orlove, Wiegandt, Luckman, Benjamin, Wiegandt and Brian2008). For now, little is known about the relationship between glaciers and societies, particularly in the high-mountain cryosphere where larger populations concentrate compared to the high-latitude cryosphere (Huggel et al. Reference Huggel, Carey, Clague, Kääb, Huggel, Carey, Clague and Kääb2015). A similar situation arises regarding their legal protection. Glacier protection as a legal matter began in the region in the early 2000s, largely in response to the mega–gold mine Pascua Lama, located on the border between Chile and Argentina at over four thousand meters above sea level. Owned by the Canadian multinational Barrick Gold, the mine impacted glaciers overlooking agricultural valleys to the east and west. Plans to preserve glaciers by relocating them sparked widespread outrage and, thanks to tireless community and activist efforts, triggered the first legislative proposal to protect glaciers (Barandiarán Reference Barandiarán2018). This struggle connected the destruction of glacier-dependent communities to planetary concerns (Li Reference Li2017) and helped fuel what has been described as the birth of cryoactivism (Taillant and Collins Reference Taillant and Collins2016). While powerful mining-sector opposition was eventually overcome in Argentina, it has not yet been in Chile; after 20 years, Congress is still debating the proposed bill (Barandiarán et al. Reference Barandiarán, Araya, Simonetti and Ragas2025; Roldán, Reference Roldán, Simonetti, Barandiarán and Ragas2026). Meanwhile, glaciers have continued to recede, sometimes to the point of disappearance. But the void left by an “ex-glacier” is apparently filled quickly by new rounds of conflict over land and over monetary and symbolic values. Drawing on experiences in three countries and using different disciplinary methods and sources, the articles in this dossier span an arc of possible engagements with glaciers—from preventative to protective and, finally, to something akin to plunder—broadly in line with how glaciers were treated as commodities in the region before the invention of artificial refrigeration (Ragas Reference Ragas2025).
What should we call, and how should we understand, a missing glacier? How should we understand its effects, as we enter the Anthropocene? This dossier invites reflection on these questions and on the efforts to protect glaciers from both direct and indirect human actions. The articles in this collection show that endangered glaciers—those in need of protection and those already extinct—possess an emerging, dynamic capacity to affect and be affected by society, with repercussions that blur any sharp distinction between geology and history, permanence and impermanence, life and death. This potentiality is hardly captured by current legislation. The articles also reveal a diverse and eclectic set of actors involved in efforts to protect glaciers, including cryoscientists with heterogeneous backgrounds in physics, chemistry, ecology, and biology, as well as politicians, activists, local communities, and mining companies. These actors bring different temporal, material, and ontological conceptions to their thinking about glaciers. In this time of disorder, how we choose to call, define, and narrate a glacier—or how we choose to understand its effects—either existing or missing, may shape how powerful glaciers become, with significant consequences for how seriously society takes the risk of extinction.
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the support of the projects “Irreversible Returns. A Study of Glaciology and Glacier Geoengineering in Chile in the context of the Anthropocene” (Fondecyt Regular nº 1220620) and “Reinventando el frío: Innovación tecnocientífica y formación del mercado del hielo en Chile, 1850–1910” (Fondecyt Iniciación n. 11220213), funded by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID). We acknowledge support also from the UCSB CREW Center for Restorative Environmental Work.
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