In light of contemporary geoengineering proposals to mitigate the impact of mining and climate change on glaciers in Chile, this article analyzes how imaginaries of glaciers have changed in recent decades. It focuses on recent proposals by consultancies and mining companies to relocate glaciers, including the transportation of over thirty thousand tons of ice to a valley with low exposure to the sun in 2007 to “save a glacier,” carried out under the auspices of Andina, a branch of Codelco, a national mining company that has the largest impact on rock glaciers in the world. This effort resonates historically with a mitigation strategy that the mining company Barrick Gold proposed in 2001 for Pascua-Lama, which in 2006 triggered an international controversy that resulted in the world’s first draft glacier bill, still under debate in the Chilean Congress, and which subsequently informed a proposal for a new constitution in Chile, rejected in 2022. This article argues that the underlying assumption behind glacier relocation initiatives is that glaciers are detachable elements from the landscape, composed of homogeneous and inert ice, the transformations of which are reversible. This assumption contrasts with conceptions of glaciers arising from earth system science and contemporary biology, which conceive of them as heterogeneous ecosystems bound to their surroundings, the eventual destruction of which is ultimately irreversible. The differences between these conceptions resonate with contrasting narratives of the place humans occupy in Earth’s history, which we term anthropocentric and planetary, according to which humans are conceived of, respectively, as masters of or in precarious balance with Earth’s history.

The Sauce Grande River Basin (Buenos Aires Province, Argentina) presents a late Pliocene–Holocene sedimentary succession that preserves key evidence of Quaternary paleoenvironmental change in the southern Pampas. This study integrates stratigraphy, sedimentology, paleopedology, geochemistry, mineralogy, and stable isotope data to reconstruct paleoenvironmental evolution from the late Pliocene to the Late Pleistocene. Three paleosol types (Calcisols, Calcic Protosols, and Protosols) were identified and characterized through field descriptions, micromorphology, and molecular indices. Their development reflects shifts in landscape stability, sediment supply, and soil moisture regimes, consistent with glacioeustatic fluctuations and climatic oscillations during the late Plio-Pleistocene transition and the Quaternary. Stable isotope analyses of pedogenic carbonates reveal a trend from C₃-dominated vegetation under more humid conditions in the late Pliocene–Early Pleistocene, to more arid Late Pleistocene–Holocene environments, with increased δ13C values indicating reduced vegetation density and a higher potential contribution of C₄ plants. These findings align with palynological and faunal evidence, highlighting the value of paleosols as sensitive indicators of environmental change. The multiproxy approach adopted here provides new insights into soil formation dynamics and Quaternary palaeoecological transitions in non-glaciated midlatitude settings of South America.

“El futuro del libro es el álbum, así como la ruina es el futuro del monumento”, propone Barthes en La preparación de la novela (Barthes 2005, 257). Según él, el álbum en tanto forma daría cuenta de un universo sin jerarquías, disperso y fragmentario, “puro tejido de contingencias”. Pero el álbum también tiene una relación, compleja, con la memoria. En parque das ruínas de Marília Garcia y El sistema del tacto de Alejandra Costamagna, el collage de restos diversos y heterogéneos—fotografías, cartas, noticias del periódico— activa una supervivencia a menudo fantasmal y paradójica. En la grieta abierta entre esos restos se cuela una visión del tiempo contemporáneo sombría y atravesada por violencias de diverso origen. Expandiendo la noción trabajada por Roland Barthes de libro álbum quisiera pensar los textos de Garcia y Costamagna, no tanto, o no solo, a partir de la noción de forma-álbum apropiada para secundar el mundo, sino sobre todo como una forma que en sus relieves cársticos deja aparecer la imagen de un tiempo presente dañado, atravesado por la violencia. Se trataría, por lo tanto, de formas contemporáneas construidas con esquirlas más que memorias, apropiadas para la escritura de un tiempo sombrío.

Bender’s Cave on the Edwards Plateau of Texas contains evidence of Late Pleistocene biodiversity that contrasts with the record from 17 regional sites dating to the last glacial interval, Marine Isotope Stage 2 (MIS 2). Bender’s Cave is a groundwater conduit system with an underground stream. Fossils occur in the cave primarily as an underwater lag assemblage and represent taxa that are typical of the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age and common to central Texas (e.g., Bison, Mammuthus, Camelops). Megalonyx jeffersonii and Mammutidae also occur in Bender’s Cave but are rare elsewhere in the region. Other fossils provide the first regional records of Holmesina septentrionalis and a species of giant Hesperotestudo. The paleoecology of those novel taxa is inconsistent with regional paleoenvironmental proxies for MIS 2, which document a relatively open, dry grassland and cool climate. The novel composition of the assemblage may be the product of sample bias, and the fossils may be vastly time-averaged. However, the identified taxa frequently co-occur in other Texas sites interpreted as dating to interstadial/interglacial intervals of the late Pleistocene (i.e., MIS 3 or MIS 5), suggesting that fossils in Bender’s Cave may also date to one of those earlier warm periods.

The Mission Creek fault strand (MCF) of the San Andreas Fault is proposed to be the primary strand accommodating slip between the Pacific and North American plates in Southern California, but its Holocene activity northwest of Indio is debated. This study presents new depositional ages for alluvial deposits near the mouth of the Mission Creek drainage to investigate potential Holocene activity of the MCF. We estimate a mean depositional age of 0.7 ± 0.2 ka for the alluvium deposited in the drainage valley, contradicting previously inferred ages of >3–18 ka. The young ages for alluvium, often indistinguishable from the age of modern alluvium, suggest that grains are transported during high-energy flash flood–like events. A comparison of luminescence and cosmogenic 10Be ages from alluvial surfaces adjacent to the Mission Creek suggests a possible reworking event at ∼30 ka. Young alluvium ages, together with evidence for frequent flash floods, suggest that this site is rapidly resurfacing and therefore unlikely to preserve surficial rupture signatures older than a few hundred years. Therefore, the lack of observable offsets in deposits overlying the MCF does not imply Holocene inactivity.

Clara Nunes (1942–1983) was one of the most renowned and successful female samba singers in Brazilian history. This article offers new interpretations of the term transposition in the analysis of how Nunes racially transformed her image and sound to fit the discourse of Brazilian mestiçagem, or race mixture, during the military dictatorship (1964–1985). Through the folklorization of Afro-Brazilian religions and traditions placed onto and voiced from her body, transposition offers a useful analytic to further understand her performance of mestiçagem as racial and gendered excess, lending itself to a queer reading. The queer potential of transposition is compounded by the legacy of black drag queens performing impersonations of Nunes following her early death to enact a sense of belonging to the Brazilian nation.

The Economic Society of Guatemala was a late colonial organization that sought to introduce “enlightened” reforms to colonial Guatemala. At first approved by the Spanish Crown, the society presented papers that were at odds with Spain’s colonial system, especially one on why Indians should be allowed to wear European clothing. In response, the Crown ordered the society closed. This article explores the threat that the society posed to established interests in both Spain and the Americas, and it utilizes previously undisclosed primary documents in which the Crown charged the society with violating numerous laws as spelled out in the Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, first published in 1680. While the society was closed in 1800, its work influenced future liberal regimes throughout Latin America.

Climate oscillations may strongly modify continental precipitation and temperature patterns, therefore understanding their history is relevant for comprehending effects of past and ongoing climate changes. For this purpose, temperature and precipitation reconstructions beyond the instrumental record are extremely useful. As widespread terrestrial archives, loess–paleosol sequences are viable targets for such analyses. Consequently, cost-efficient geophysical proxies have gained increasing attention, but little is known about their capability to reflect even narrow climatic differences. Here we assess the sensitivity of rock-magnetic and photo-spectrometric properties of topsoil samples (n = 50) along uncorrelated, mean annual precipitation (MAP: 525±1 mm/yr to 584±1 mm/yr) and mean annual temperature (MAT: 10.8±0.1 °C to 11.2±0.1 °C) gradients across the Bačka Loess Plateau (Serbia) and test a multivariate approach. Most proxies are sensitive to MAP <565±1 mm/yr, especially anhysteretic remanent magnetization (r2 = 0.81). Applying a multivariate approach to hysteresis data reveals a robust relationship between precipitation (r2 = 0.63), aridity (r2 = 0.67) and physical properties over the entire MAP range. Although the approach needs to be further tested considering different climates, regression analyses, and timescales, our study indicates that multi-proxy approaches may increase the robustness with respect to single-proxy measurements for MAP and aridity reconstructions.

This article, which relies on underutilized archival collections as well as oral histories, is one of the first comprehensive examinations of the feminist struggle to decriminalize abortion during Brazil’s transition to democracy during the 1980s. We discuss how the consolidation of the antiabortion Christian right and its proximity to several political parties, including ones on the left, coupled with the politically moderate tone of the transition from dictatorship to democracy, constrained the space in which Brazilian feminists could make radical demands of the state. Moreover, we contend that although the creation of the state-funded feminist organ Conselho Nacional dos Direitos da Mulher in 1985 brought important visibility to feminist issues and inserted the movement’s agenda squarely within the government apparatus, it also fragmented feminists, threatened co-optation by the state, and ultimately compelled abortion rights activists to prioritize the more palatable strategy of expanding access to therapeutic abortions, which were already permitted by law. In addition to divergences in political strategy, feminists struggled to create multiracial and multiclass coalitions during this period, when many Black feminists and working-class women were organizing around other concerns. As a result, feminists were not able to fundamentally alter public opinion about the political importance of abortion, and their efforts to enshrine the termination of pregnancy as a human right in the 1988 Constitution were unsuccessful.

We examined trends in sediment deposition, organic carbon sourcing, and carbon and nitrogen isotopes in a transect of four lake sediment cores from eastern Glacier National Park (GNP), Montana, USA to understand how a connected chain of subalpine lakes downvalley from a retreating Grinnell Glacier have responded to environmental change over the last two centuries. Based on 210Pb ages, all three lakes showed a two- to five-fold increase in mass accumulation rate (MAR), with increased MAR beginning at most sites just prior to when GNP was established in 1910 CE, and again at the start of “The Great Acceleration.” Changes in MAR as a result of glacier retreat occurred at the most upvalley site, complicated by shifts in lake size and hydrology. A decrease in C:N ratios and slightly enriched δ13C values since ∼1850s CE reflect a shift toward decreasing terrestrial organic contributions and increased lake productivity. Concurrently, δ15N values were increasingly depleted across all sites over time. The most downvalley site captured spikes in MAR, C:N, and δ13C coincident with recorded flood events. This work demonstrates how organic geochemical and isotopic proxies together capture evolving connectivity between glaciers, catchments, lakes, and human activity under a warming climate.

Lake sediments record past hydrologic variability, but natural lakes are often sparse in semiarid and arid regions, making the calibration of paleohydrologic models a challenge. At Lake Elsinore, the largest of the few natural lakes in Southern California, we explore and develop a novel transfer function approach for reconstructing lake depth. Using 32 modern surface sediment samples spanning Lake Elsinore’s littoral to profundal zones, we establish a statistical relationship between lake depth and sediment elemental geochemistry composition analyzed via X-ray fluorescence (XRF). We develop lake depth transfer functions using weighted averaging-partial least squares (WA-PLS) and modern analog technique (MAT). Application of the WA-PLS C5 elemental geochemistry-based transfer function to Lake Elsinore sediment cores reveals a climatically sensitive and variable lake hydrology over the past 32,000 years. The reconstruction suggests a prolonged shallowing during an early Marine Isotope Stage 2 (MIS 2) mega-drought between 28,000 and 25,000 cal yr BP, a deep lake spanning the last glacial maximum, a wet–dry response to the Younger Dryas, and a highly dynamic MIS 1/Holocene lake. This single-lake elemental geochemistry technique may be useful in similar settings for reconstructing lake depth and inferring past hydrologic changes.