(Melting) Ice

Join us for (Melting) Ice🧊❄️, the second event in our Manchester Workshop Series on Natural Archives and the History of Science in Asia. This workshop series is convened by Dr Amelia Bonea (Lecturer in Global History of Science, Technology and Medicine, CHSTM, University of Manchester) and Dr Meng Zhang (Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, CHSTM, University of Manchester), in collaboration with the John Rylands Research Institute and Manchester China Institute.

Speakers:

Dr Tilak Tewari (Junior Professional Fellow, Centre for Ecology Development and Research, Dehradun, India)

Disciplining Ice: Colonial Bodies and the Neglected Origins of Glaciology in High Mountain Asia (c. 1808-1860)

British efforts to survey, traverse, and inscribe High Mountain Asia into imperial cartographic and scientific knowledge systems intensified at the turn of the nineteenth century. In this period, exploratory accounts began to register encounters with glaciers and other cryospheric phenomena, thereby generating some of the earliest empirical observations of ice in the region. These observations, though locally situated and often mediated through bodily experience, would later circulate, albeit in heavily reinterpreted form, into metropolitan scientific discourse, where figures such as James Forbes (1809-1868) consolidated authority over glaciological theory by the mid-nineteenth century.

This talk examines the interplay of locality, embodiment, and epistemic authority in these early high-altitude ventures. It foregrounds the medical and physiological dimensions of exploration, interrogating how European bodies functioned simultaneously as fragile instruments and measuring devices in extreme environments, effectively acting as “barometers” of altitude and cold. It further considers the conscription of indigenous labour and expertise, whose corporeal endurance and situated knowledge were indispensable, yet systematically effaced within the metropolitan consolidation of glaciology.

By repositioning High Mountain Asia within the historiography of glaciology, this talk highlights both the obscured contributions of local actors and the epistemic filtering through which metropolitan science delegitimised their knowledge as anecdotal or unrefined. In doing so, it demonstrates how imperial science was constituted through asymmetries of bodily risk, authority, and recognition, and how the discipline of glaciology itself emerged through the selective appropriation and simultaneous marginalisation of diverse empirical encounters with ice.

Dr Katja Doose (Assistant Professor, University of Lyon 2 & Senior Researcher, University of Fribourg)

Glaciers between Archive and Laboratory: A History of Central Asian Glaciology in the Late 19th to the Mid-20th Century

Today glaciers are routinely described as “natural archives,” their ice cores mined for records of atmospheric history. However, for scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, glaciers were not archives of the past but laboratories of the present: gauges of water supply, sites for mapping and high-altitude physiology, and emblems of imperial reach. This talk follows the trajectory from late-nineteenth-century Russian expeditions in the Pamirs through the first Soviet decade, when glaciology emerged as a strategic science. It examines how explorers and early geologists mapped the high mountains, renamed peaks, and framed the “roof of the world” as both a site of scientific discovery and a resource for the empire. These practices culminated in the construction of the Fedchenko Glacier observatory in 1932 and the launch of the Tajik-Pamir Expedition, which transformed the glacier into a symbol of Soviet modernity and hydrological promise. By tracing this transition from tsarist exploration to Soviet techno-utopianism, the talk shows how ice became both a physical archive of past climates and a political object through which empires sought to inscribe their presence on the high-altitude landscapes of Asia.

Prof Yuriko Furuhata (Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History, McGill University)

Refrigerated Time Capsules: Cinema and the Colonial Roots of Japan’s Polar Science

Cinema and ice both operate as comparable storage media that hold material traces of the past. This paper explores the imperial grammar and roots of climate science in the polar regions through the cinematic record, The Japanese Expedition to Antarctica (Nihon nankyoku tanken, 1910-1912). In doing so, I situate the contemporary study of ice cores as natural archives of paleoclimate conditions in the geopolitical context of Japan’s settler colonization of the sub-Arctic island of Sakhalin, where Japan and Russia (and later the Soviet Union) competed to expand their settlement from the 1870s through the 1940s. During the international rush to reach the South Pole in the 1910s, Sakhalin, positioned as the Japanese Empire’s northernmost “frontier,” emerged as a climatological proxy or analog for Antarctica. To unpack this geopolitical context, I examine the little-discussed participation of two Indigenous Sakhalin Ainu explorers in Japan’s first expedition to Antarctica, documented in the abovementioned film. Furthermore, by highlighting the material vulnerability of cinema and ice, I will revisit and complicate Bruno Latour’s well-known concept of “immutable mobiles” and its relevance to the material history of storage media and Sakhalin.

Xin Yang (PhD Student, University of Glasgow)

Situating Polar Science: China’s Pathways from the Third Pole to the Poles

China’s polar science did not begin at the poles. It grew out of long-running research on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau—the so-called ‘Third Pole’—whose programs in aeronomy, meteorology, and glaciology supplied instruments, problem framings, personnel, and international links later mobilized in Arctic and Antarctic work. This talk argues that China’s interest in the North and South Poles is a continuation of the enthusiasm for scientific exploration of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. The research conducted by China on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau has provided the intellectual grounding for its scientific explorations in the Arctic and Antarctic. In other words, by virtue of the unique nature of global science, China is constructing cognitive relationships between itself and the globe through the process of production and circulation of knowledge. Milestones such as early informal collaboration with the University of Bergen and a mid-1990s application to join the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) exemplify how plateau expertise facilitated entry into polar arenas. Drawing on archival materials, oral history records and research reports, I reconstruct the pathway from frontier, site-based investigations to problem-driven polar engagements, showing that China’s polar turn is best read as the extension and re-scaling of an existing epistemic infrastructure rather than a rupture. This reframing connects China’s ‘Third Pole’ science to its subsequent Arctic/Antarctic activity.

Moderators: Dr Amelia Bonea & Dr Meng Zhang

Organised by: CHSTM, University of Manchester, in collaboration with the John Rylands Research Institute and Library & Manchester China Institute

*Cover image credit: The Chinese survey team conducting triangulation observations at an altitude of 6,617 metres on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (1966-1968). From Photographic Record of Scientific Expeditions to the Mount Qomolangma Region (1966–1968).

Image credit: Louis Agassiz’s Études sur les glaciers (1840) Courtesy of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, the University of Manchester.