Ice humanities: living, working, and thinking in a melting world – Sverker Sörlin and Klaus Dodds Part I: Living with ice1 Writing on sea ice: early modern Icelandic scholars – Astrid E. J. Ogilvie2 A moving element: ice, culture, and economy in northern and northwestern Russia – Alexei Kraikovski3 Ever higher: the mountain cryosphere – Dani Inkpen 4 Glacier protection campaigns: what do they really save? – Mark Carey, Jordan Barton, and Sam Flanzer 5 Ice futures: the extension of jurisdiction in the Anthropocene north – Bruce Erickson, Liam Kennedy-Slaney, and James WiltPart II: Working with ice6 White spots on rivers of gold: imperial glaciers in Russian Central Asia – Christine Bichsel7 The many ways that water froze: a taxonomy of ice in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America – Jonathan Rees8 Drift, capture, break, and vanish: sea ice in the Soviet Museum of the Arctic in the 1930s – Julia Lajus and Ruth Maclennan9 Waiting and witnessing at Larsen C Ice Shelf, Antarctica – Jessica O’ReillyPart III: Thinking with ice10 Imperial slippages: encountering and knowing ice in and beyond colonial India – Thomas Simpson11 Negotiating governable objects: glaciers in Argentina – Jasmin Höglund Hellgren12 Cryonarratives for warming times: icebergs as planetary travellers – Elizabeth Leane13 Frozen archives on the go: ice cores and the temporalization of Earth system science – Erik IsbergIndex

Ice humanities is a pioneering collection of essays that tackles the existential crisis posed by the planet’s diminishing ice reserves. By the end of this century, we will likely be facing a world where sea ice no longer reliably forms in large areas of the Arctic Ocean, where glaciers have not just retreated but disappeared, where ice sheets collapse, and where permafrost is far from permanent. The ramifications of such change are not simply geophysical and biochemical. They are societal and cultural, and they are about value and loss. Where does this change leave our inherited ideas, knowledge, and experiences of ice, snow, frost, and frozen ground? How will human, animal, and plant communities superbly adapted to cold and high places cope with less ice, or even none at all? The ecological services provided by ice are breath-taking, providing mobility, water, and food security for hundreds of millions of people around the world, often Indigenous and vulnerable communities. The stakes could not be higher. Drawing on sources ranging from oral testimony to technical scientific expertise, this path-breaking collection sets out a highly compelling claim for the emerging field of ice humanities, convincingly demonstrating that the centrality of ice in human and non-human life is now impossible to ignore.