In the South Andes, glaciers have been considered strategic resources for coping with climate change, given their capacity to modulate the climate and store large amounts of fresh water, on which various species, including humans, depend, mainly in the summer when less water is available. However, their protection has been thwarted time and again by the conceptual limits under which the legislation and institutional framework tasked with protecting them operate, often informed by lobbying from private and state mining companies. Addressing this problem requires untangling the way that temporal and material understandings of glaciers differ and have—currently and historically—shifted between relevant actors in science, industry, the state, and its citizenry, along with the diverse cultures that live near them, all of whom tend to put forth and mobilize contrasting imageries.
Indeed, diverse temporal horizons tend to converge when imagining the future of glaciers. To name a few examples, we could list those inherent to glaciology, with their vast geological scales; those pertaining to politics and the economy, with the need to generate prompt returns on investments; or those of citizens, who are immersed in the immediate spectacle of urban social life and tend to be abstracted from the planet’s slow transformations. In contrast, such transformations are becoming increasingly more visible to societies located in high latitudes and altitudes, whose glaciers are melting at an ever-faster pace. At the same time, contemporary imagery of the future of glaciers tends to contain different understandings of what glaciers are or what they are made of, including those grounded on the particular viewpoint of Western science, currently tasked with assessing their future. Traditionally dominated by physics and chemistry, glaciology science has conceived of glaciers as inert entities, or water in a solid state that, due to gravity, flows downhill over time. However, in recent decades, an alternative scientific conception of glaciers has begun to emerge according to which they constitute complex and habitable ecosystems.
This vision corresponds in part to the emergence of earth system science (ESS), which conceives of the planet as a complex, interconnected, and self-regulated system, within which the so-called cryosphere—from the Greek words κρύoς (cryos), “ice,” and σφαῖρα (sphere) “globe”—constitutes a subsystem responsible for modulating the global climate, among countless other planetary processes (Steffen et al. Reference Steffen, Katherine, Johan, Hans Joachim, Opha Pauline, Sébastien, Timothy M. and Jane2020). In turn, this perspective coincides with biology’s recent incursion into cryosphere studies, with findings suggesting that glacial ice is far from being an aseptic and solid material and therefore unfit for life. On the contrary, in the eyes of contemporary biology, glacial ice constitutes a habitable environment where different species, such as microorganisms, algae, worms, and birds, among others, create complex, heterogeneous, and unique ecosystems (Hodson et al. Reference Hodson, Alexandre M., Martyn, Andrew, Mark, John, Johanna and Birgit2008; Boetius et al. Reference Boetius, Alexandre M., Jody W., Jill A. and Josephine Z.2015). This understanding resonates with the traditional knowledge of indigenous societies who live near the ice, both in and outside the region, for whom glaciers are crucial to social life and often viewed as living entities worthy of veneration (Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank2005; Gearheard et al. Reference Gearheard, Lene K., Henry and Joe M.2013; Gagné et al. Reference Gagné, Mattias B. and Ben2014; Bacigalupo et al. Reference Bacigalupo, Guillermo Salas, Karsten, Georgina, Karine and Mabel2021; Ceruti Reference Ceruti2020; Gagné and Drew Reference Gagné and Georgina2024).
This article examines the different temporal and material imageries of glaciers, which converge on recent glacier geoengineering proposals in Chile to mitigate the effects of mining and climate change. These are efforts related to real glaciers and territories, not laboratory or phytotron geoengineering initiatives seeking to create artificial climates (Munns Reference Munns2017). In particular, this study focuses on initiatives by private consulting firms and mining companies to relocate and regenerate glaciers, including the transport of over thirty thousand tons of ice in 2007 to “preserve” a glacier in central Chile. This effort was led by Geoestudios—the first and most established private consultant on glaciers in Chile—and was sponsored by the state mining company Codelco, responsible for causing extensive damage to glaciers in Chile. This effort resonated with an earlier proposal made by the Canadian company Barrick Gold in 2001, when the company suggested relocating glaciers to valleys with low thermal exposure as a strategy to mitigate the impact of its mining project on the border between Argentina and Chile. Significant environmental movements on both sides of the Andes reacted to the company’s proposal. Their reaction generated an environmental conflict with international repercussions, arguably the first of its kind involving direct impact on glaciers, which gave rise to what has been described as cryoactivism: an emerging environmental commitment to protecting the cryosphere (Taillant and Collins Reference Taillant and Peter2016). This commitment—associated with an understanding of glaciers as complex entities that are essential to social life and are, therefore, more than mere water in a frozen state—led to the first national glacier bill to be proposed in 2006. The bill, still under debate in the Chilean Congress, partially inspired the first law of its type in Argentina, which was passed in 2010.Footnote 1
Concern for glaciers also partly contributed to the drafting of a new proposed constitution for Chile. This draft, rejected in 2022, for the first time in global history offered glaciers total protection from private interests at the constitutional level by recognizing them as key for ecosystem regulation. The draft had been generated partially as a result of mobilizations derived from the social upheaval of 2019, the most important and critical of the current century in Chile. It sought to replace the constitution imposed under the Pinochet dictatorship, which has often been identified as responsible for perpetuating the Chilean neoliberal experiment over time. This experiment is considered by many to have been intensified by the progressive governments that ruled Chile after the return to democracy, in times of a global commodity boom. This boom coincided with the emergence of what has been identified as neo-extractivism in the region, or the generalized return of a state-driven productivist vision of development based on the overexploitation of raw materials at the expense of the ecological and social consequences. Overexploitation of raw materials has been marked, among other things, by conflicts with rural communities, indigenous societies, and their territories (Svampa Reference Svampa2019; Gudynas Reference Gudynas2009; Martínez Novo Reference Martínez Novo2021). When it comes to intervention in glaciers, neo-extractive policies have tended to operate with brutal disregard for the consequences to the ecosystems they are part of and for guaranteeing equitable access to water (Barandiarán Reference Javiera2018). Just access to water was one of the central slogans of the movements that, after the social uprising, led to the possibility of drafting a new constitution for Chile.
This article reveals the persistence of a traditional understanding of glaciers as homogeneous and inert entities throughout these charged public debates. This understanding coincides with a physicochemical definition of glaciers, according to which they are nothing more than water in a solid state and therefore could be relocated from one valley to another in an allegedly reversible process. We argue that this conception is the result of the historical development of geology, marked by what the philosopher of geology Robert Frodeman (Reference Frodeman2003) and the geographer Doreen Massey (Reference Massey2005) have described as a generalized envy at the achievements of the hard sciences, particularly physics. This envy, according to Frodeman and Massey, has been grounded on an established reductionist principle defended famously by logical positivism. According to it, hard forms of knowledge have a primacy over soft ones, as the latter can be progressively reduced into the former (e.g., evolutionary biology into chemistry and, subsequently, chemistry into physics).Footnote 2 This traditional physicochemical vision of glacier ice as inert contrasts radically with the more recent ecological understanding of glaciers put forth by ESS and cryosphere biology, according to which glaciers are heterogeneous entities embedded in complex and self-regulated ecosystems, in which humans and other living entities participate and whose processes of change are irreversible. The contrast between these visions resonates with two narratives about humanity’s place in nature, which we term anthropocentric and planetary.
The first narrative relates to the exceptional place that the West has assigned to humanity above all other species and the idea of an unlimited nature, whose resources allowed a sustained increase in social complexity through technological development, ideas forged in modern science mostly throughout the Enlightenment (Haraway et al. Reference Haraway, Noboru, Scott F., Kenneth, Anna L. and Nils2016). This exceptional place, which in turn coincides with an understanding of inorganic matter as passive and inert, partially explains the environmental crisis by justifying human subjugation of nature (Bennett Reference Bennett2010). In contrast, the latter concept refers to the emergence of comparative planetology, a field concerned with studying the singularities of Earth—particularly life—by comparing it with other planets in the solar system and beyond. This field is implicitly associated with the establishment of earth system science and the idea that organic life has turned the planet into a self-regulating system. It is also linked to the formulation of the Anthropocene concept, proposed to describe a new geological epoch—originally presumed to have begun with the Industrial Revolution—in which humankind becomes the dominant geological force (Crutzen Reference Crutzen2002). The Anthropocene concept illustrates how science has gained awareness that human existence, and that of all the multiple other species that inhabit the planet, is the result of a precarious balance that is the product of the singular, unique, and unrepeatable history of planet Earth (Clark and Szerszynski Reference Clark and Szerszynski2021). Such awareness is partially related to the verification that contemporary extractivism, in the context of late capitalism, has become a phenomenon of planetary proportions (Arboleda Reference Arboleda2020). Based on the contrast between these two narratives—grandiose and humble—of the place humans occupy in the history of the earth, this article argues that attempts to reverse the effects of the environmental crisis through glacial geoengineering in Chile are nothing more than an extension of the exceptional place that Western thought has traditionally assigned to humanity in nature.
The argument presented here concentrates on an analysis of statements by key stakeholders associated with glacier geoengineering proposals in Chile, including scientists, private consultants, politicians, mining representatives, state officials, environmental activists, and members of the public registered on public websites and media. This material includes reports and video recordings of the interventions and discussions of stakeholders registered in the framework of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the Pascua-Lama and Andina projects, as well as in debates on the glacier bill in Congress and on the recently failed constitutional project. The material, entirely of a public nature, has been accessed and downloaded through public media and official government websites and analyzed to conceptually understand the conception of glaciers that have historically underlie geoengineering proposals in Chile. The analysis and its conclusions are grounded in long-term historical and ethnographic work with expert glaciologists in Chile and abroad, conducted over the past decade by a historian of anthropological sensibility and an anthropologist of historical inclination, both interested in environmental controversies. This empirical research rests on dozens of interviews with expert glaciologists, including key figures involved in glacier geoengineering proposals in Chile.Footnote 3
The article is divided into three sections. The first section flashes back on the history of glacier geoengineering in Chile. It starts by looking into recent initiatives that were contemplated during congressional debates on the last glacier bill proposed in 2019. The bill was controversially described by mining representatives and expert glaciologists as potentially excluding any intervention on glaciers for the benefit of society, including not just mining but geoengineering initiatives to mitigate the effects of global warming. In describing the positions of relevant stakeholders surrounding the glacier bill and its controversies, the section traces the history of these geoengineering proposals back to Andina’s relocation of a glacier in 2007 and its striking resemblance to Barrick Gold’s mitigation plan for Pascua-Lama, proposed in 2001.
The second section argues that these proposals to geoengineer glaciers in Chile are grounded in traditional conceptions of humans as masters of a passive and infinitely abundant nature and of glaciers as inert. We show how this traditional perspective on glaciers contrasts with more recent views, informed by ESS. Such views are currently advanced by a younger generation of glaciologists in Chile, particularly members of an Independent Panel of Cryosphere Researchers, established in 2021, who advised the drafting of the failed constitutional proposal in Chile and have questioned glacier relocation initiatives. In developing this contrast, we show that current proposals to geoengineer glaciers advanced by some leading glaciology consultants share roots with earlier experiments conducted prior to the scientific establishment of global warming narratives in Chile. We concentrate particularly on the work of Cedomir Marangunic, founder and chief executive officer of Geoestudios, responsible for attempting to geoengineer glaciers in the 1960s, not to preserve them, but to increase melting in times of drought. In developing this comparative analysis, we illustrate some of the continuities and discontinuities that emerge as traditional views on glaciers are forced to accommodate new ones, in the face of global warming.
The third section theorizes key assumptions on the nature of glaciers underlying geoengineering proposals to relocate them. We argue that the possibility of relocating glaciers presupposes that glaciers can be detached from the environment in which they formed and be regenerated in a different environment to a state prior to anthropogenic influence, in an allegedly reversible process. Underlying such a view, we suggest, is a physicochemical understanding of glaciers as mere frozen water, a view challenged by recent developments in earth system science and cryobiology, the very same new thinking that seems to ground proposals to protect glaciers in Chile at the legislative and constitutional levels. The article closes with some concluding remarks that expand briefly on the environmental risks and political implications of such proposals for the governance of glaciers.
Glacier experimentation
In June 2019, practically a year after its submission to Congress, the most recent Chilean glacier bill—which is still under debate—was sent from the Senate Environment and National Assets Committee to the Energy and Mining Committee as part of the consultation process for its subsequent approval. This happened in the middle of a debate in which the bill’s main sponsor, Senator Guido Girardi, decried a renewed effort on the part of the private and public mining sectors to hinder its progress.Footnote 4 The glacier bill emerged from a previous one submitted by Senator Antonio Horvath in 2006, an unprecedented effort that allegedly laid the groundwork for the legislative debate that led to the world’s first Glacier Act in Argentina two years later. However, amid the Chilean mining sector’s powerful lobby as the country’s main economic activity, the initial bill failed on the western side of the Andes.
Aware of the challenges that the climate crisis imposed on the planet’s habitability, the position taken by Girardi and other advocates, such as Senators Isabel Allende and Yasna Provoste, was categorical. They argued that there was an imperative need to protect glaciers as strategic freshwater reserves, recognizing them as national goods for public use. Critics, including Baldo Prokurica, minister of mining under former president Sebastián Piñera, countered that the so-called Girardi Bill threatened the continuity of tens of thousands of jobs directly and indirectly associated with the mining sector if accepted in its original version. The text was approved to begin its legislative process with thirty-three votes in favor and six abstentions, practically all by senators from the right-wing party Unión Demócrata Independiente. The Energy and Mining Committee had a short deadline to submit amendments.
In July 2019, a month after the start of the legislative process, glaciology experts were summoned to the Energy and Mining Committee sessions to contribute to the debate. The prominent glaciologist Gino Casassa, on whom Minister Prokurica had based his own presentation to the Senate a few weeks earlier, was summoned in his capacity as head of the Glaciology and Snow Unit. This agency, part of the Public Works Ministry’s General Water Board, was the only state entity entirely dedicated to glaciology at the time and was responsible for elaborating the National Glacier Inventory, the first edition of which was published in 2014.Footnote 5
Casassa’s testimony emphasized the need to protect glaciers. However, at the same time, it was marked by points questioning the bill, including its excessive protectionism, which could retroactively and proactively prevent various actions on glaciers and their surroundings, some of them potentially desirable based on the tone of the presentation. A few years earlier, Casassa had warned in an interview with the newspaper La Tercera (2014) of the need to be wary of an “ecological hysteria” that prevented reconciling “national development with protection of our glaciers.” His view was reflected in the following statement: “As a mountain lover, one would prefer for there to be no intervention, but Chile is a mining country, and this is important for our economy. I am convinced that sustainable exploitation is possible, developing mitigation and compensation measures so nature can recover” (La Tercera 2014).
Among the list of possible alterations to glaciers that the new bill would have excluded, Casassa mentioned sports activities like a ski slope on the Presena glacier in Italy. He also listed the construction of mining vehicle roads on glaciers, exemplified with an eleven-kilometer access road to the Brucejack goldmine on Knipple Glacier in British Columbia, Canada, something that Casassa alleged “is allowed in a country that takes great care of the environment but also clearly takes care of mining” and where “the glacier’s impact on the road is far greater” than the road’s on the glacier (Casassa Reference Casassa2019). Casassa also mentioned a tunnel built for tourists in the famous Mer de Glace glacier in Chamonix, France, which also allows water to be collected for a hydroelectric plant. Continuing with his list, Casassa (Reference Casassa2019) also contemplated interventions in Chile and abroad focused on artificially preserving or regenerating glaciers, describing some of them as “interesting experiments.”Footnote 6 The list included an initiative to reduce glacier ablation by covering them with geotextiles, promoted by Clemente Pérez—former director of the National Environmental Commission (CONAMA) for the Metropolitan Region—through his Glacier Cooler venture. Taking the use of artificial snow to maintain ski centers in central Chile as an example, Casassa (Reference Casassa2019) continued his list by noting that “the same could be done with glaciers, but at a tremendous [economic] cost, of course.” He shared with legislators that Switzerland had already taken such steps.
Casassa also mentioned what he called “interesting innovations” to regenerate glaciers with snow barriers, promoted by consulting firms and scientific centers. This initiative was partially associated with his mentor, former boss, friend, and colleague Cedomir Marangunic and his consulting firm Geoestudios, which was implicitly present in several parts of Casassa’s presentation, for instance, through the use of images that belonged to the firm. Casassa and Marangunic shared a long history.Footnote 7 Following in Marangunic’s footsteps, Casassa studied engineering at the University of Chile and subsequently obtained a PhD from Ohio State University, the same institution where Marangunic became Chile’s first PhD in glaciology a few decades before. Coincidentally, both have been described as “ice men” in national media outlets like El Mercurio (2019) and La Tercera (2014). This term is regularly applied to distinguished glaciologists, carrying gender connotations of male dominance over nature. Similar ideas have also been used to describe the achievements of Louis Lliboutry, the French geophysicist who advanced the field of glaciology at the University of Chile in the 1950s and whom many consider to be the father of Chilean glaciology (Turrel Reference Turrel2019; Carey et al. Reference Carey, M., A. and J.2016).
After leading the creation of the glaciology unit at the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia—a private nonprofit corporation dedicated to the development of research of excellence in Chile—Casassa returned to Santiago to join Geoestudios, the consulting firm founded by Marangunic in the late 1970s. Geoestudios was the first consultancy to carry out work on glaciers for private and state industry in Chile and was responsible for promoting various experiments to regenerate glaciers, including the one Casassa mentioned in his presentation. Indeed, Casassa’s intervention seemed to mirror a prior presentation delivered by Marangunic in 2006 during legislative debates on the Horvath Bill. In it, Marangunic addressed the Environment and National Assets Committee and expressed himself in favor of the possibility of engaging in glacial experimentation as a strategy to mitigate the expansion of mining industries (Comisión de Medio Ambiente y Bienes Nacionales 2006, 11). These ideas were soon put into practice. In media statements, Marangunic promoted initiatives to preserve glaciers by relocating them to valleys with lower thermal exposure (Laborde Reference Laborde2013; see also Geoestudios 2020). These efforts were under the auspices of the Andina Division of Codelco, a state mining company involved in major environmental controversies associated with projects literally located atop glaciers. These were the projects that, according to Prokurica, would have to cease their activities were the law passed, which would cause the loss of thousands of jobs in the mining sector.
At the Andina mine in the Valparaíso region, Codelco has carried out the most significant interventions in rock glaciers—distinctive geological formations composed of a consolidated mix of ice and debris—worldwide. In one of his “glacier saving” experiments in 2007, Marangunic cut up and extracted over thirty thousand cubic meters from an at-risk glacier and relocated the ice to a neighboring valley with less exposure to solar radiation using mining trucks. In an interview in 2013, Marangunic described this experiment as “absolutely positive” in terms of its results, although these had not been published at the time and have not been published to this day (Laborde 2013, authors’ translation). Nonetheless, Marangunic’s interventions undoubtedly offered an alternative to mining, considering that Andina had removed between one million and eight million tons of ice per year in the period 1991–2000 (Morales Reference Morales2001; Brenning Reference Brenning, Ben, Ellen and Brian H.2008; Brenning and Azócar Reference Brenning and Guillermo F.2010; Bórquez et al. Reference Bórquez, Sara Larraín, Rodrigo and Juan C.2006).
Although it is not possible to access image records of the experiments Marangunic carried out on the Andina glaciers, they share remarkable similarity to the management proposal for the Pascua-Lama mine. The Andina images have been actively concealed by the company to avoid public controversies, as happened to Barrick. The Canadian multinational, the world’s biggest gold-mining company at the time, triggered an unprecedented environmental controversy that quickly became the starting point for the legislative debate on the world’s first glacier law, initially in Chile and subsequently in Argentina (Taillant Reference Taillant2015). Straddling the Argentina-Chile border, the project proposed a glacier management plan that, similar to what Marangunic did, involved fracturing and transporting blocks of glacial ice—specifically, the glaciers El Toro 1, El Toro 2, and Esperanza—from one valley to another in the hope that they would reform as a continuous mass and regenerate over time (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Pascua-Lama’s glacier management plan distributed by international mining company Barrick Gold to local communities.
Social scientists and humanities scholars have written much about the Pascua-Lama mining project in northern Chile’s Atacama Region, mostly condemning Barrick’s crude proposal for gold extraction. The images and some of the details included in the company’s management plan certainly justify this, like the use of dynamite to fracture glaciers. However, the analyses have tended to overlook the profoundly experimental nature of the agreements that Barrick reached with the environmental authorities on both sides of the Andes, including the environmental impact assessment that the Regional Environment Commission (COREMA), dependent on CONAMA, ultimately approved in Chile. In its 2001 resolution on the environmental impact assessment, COREMA gave Barrick the condition of “implementing a set of measures to avoid destroying sectors of glaciers that will be removed, in addition to protecting them, avoiding their disappearance” (emphasis added). Elaborating on this requirement, the COREMA indicated the following: “The Principal [Barrick] will implement a program to monitor the removed and relocated glaciers to verify their evolution and the measure’s suitability. A full report must be prepared on the operations carried out for the extraction of glacier sectors and their disposal in places chosen as the most appropriate sites. This report must be submitted once this work has been completed. Monitoring will then be carried out for one year, and a report containing the observations made will be submitted. Reports shall be submitted to the CONAMA Regional Directorate.”
Shifting paradigms
Arguably, the controversy in Pascua-Lama was a symptom of a larger, still-advancing paradigm shift in environmental policy on glaciers in South America and globally, acting as a Kuhnian node between what could be described as an encounter between two incommensurable ways of relating to nature (Kuhn Reference Kuhn1962). We term these anthropocentric and planetary, with the former marked by an alleged unlimited abundance of natural resources and the centrality of humans in their management, and the latter by the limited availability of these resources and human dependence on precarious biophysical balances that result from the singular history of planet Earth. As Li (Reference Li2017, 113) argues, the glaciers intervened by Barrick unprecedentedly “connected the valley [and its people] to planetary concerns and human survival.” In line with the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2019), this planetary way of understanding humanity’s connection to nature leads to the question of habitability, which contrasts sharply with the logic of sustainability that characterizes anthropocentric thinking. Whereas the concept of sustainability is historically related to concepts like globalization and the possibility of collectively managing natural resources for the benefit of global humanity, habitability is related to the comparative study of life on other planets and the understanding that the balance that has allowed life to exist on Earth is not only unique but also profoundly fragile. According to the theories of emerging disciplines such as astrobiology—a science established in the second half of the twentieth century under the auspices of the space race and dedicated to the comparative study of life on other planets—this balance could suddenly break down, as allegedly happened in nearby planets such as Mars. It is worth noting here that the emergence of astrobiology is as much related to the establishment of a planetary view of the history of life on earth typical of both earth systems science and the Anthropocene (Lenton Reference Lenton2016; Messeri Reference Messeri2014; Clark and Szerszynski Reference Clark and Szerszynski2021) as it is to the study of life in extreme environments, including glacial ice (García-López and Cid Reference Garcia-Lopez and Cristina2017).
The reactions to the experimental nature of glacier geoengineering in response to both the climate crisis and the local impacts of mining companies, prompted by the Pascua-Lama controversy, precisely speak of the encounter between two contrasting and again apparently incommensurable ways of understanding glaciers. One example arises from the contrast between the aforementioned experts’ interventions on the bills and that of the Independent Panel of Cryosphere Researchers in 2021 before the Environment and National Assets Committee (El Mostrador 2021). This group, convened only a few months earlier by a new generation of young researchers without financing or ties to the mining sector, argued systematically and from the outset in favor of limiting industry’s impact on glaciers and their surroundings even more, proposing amendments to the draft bill as well as to the text for a new proposed constitution.
Some leading members of this organization participated in applied research efforts to assist communities in Putaendo, a locality north of Santiago, whose water resources had been threatened by the copper mine Vizcachitas. They used isotope analysis to prove that water consumed by animal herders and farmers in Putaendo was mostly of glacial origin. In another project in Chile’s Araucanía region, these same scientists participated in intercultural dialogues with Mapuche indigenous communities. Curated by the anthropologist Kristina Lyons and inspired by Marisol de la Cadena’s work on ontological opening, these dialogues resulted in a presentation narrating an exchange between Alejandra Aillapan, a Mapuche spiritual leader (Machi), and leading members of the Independent Panel of Cryosphere Researchers, particularly the glaciologists Hans Fernández and Sebastián Crespo (Fernández Reference Fernández2023).
During an event in 2021 titled “Glacier Law and New Constitution,” the glaciologist Sebastián Crespo (Reference Crespo2021), the group’s spokesman and an active participant in the previously mentioned initiative, engaged in a confrontation with Marangunic after he implicitly questioned efforts to protect glaciers. During the event, Marangunic described the increase in temperatures due to global warming as inevitable, progressive, and therefore beyond the scope of human influence because the temperature changes are unfolding on a geological timescale. Aware of Marangunic’s past experiments on glaciers, including efforts to preserve them through the relocation of glacial ice, Crespo reacted by questioning the integrity of his interlocutor’s interests.
One way to understand the logic behind Marangunic’s glacier experimentation is as reflective of an anthropocentric perspective that emerged before current debates on climate change were established in Chile. In the 1960s, in the middle of one of the most intense droughts that Chile experienced in the second half of the twentieth century, Marangunic embarked on an enterprise to force nature’s hand, shortly before the country’s first hydroelectric plant on the Rapel River was inaugurated in June 1968. Marangunic, who was just getting started in glaciology consulting, was summoned by friends who worked for the National Electricity Company (ENDESA) to increase glacier ablation. The experiments were conducted on the Cotón Glacier, which partially supplied the Rapel plant’s reservoir. The proposed suggestions, some of which were ultimately implemented, included covering glaciers with dark particulate material that would accelerate the thawing process. The optimism after the tests on the Cotón Glacier was such that in an institutional publication ENDESA (1969) declared that it was “an experience worthy of attention, as if it is both economically and technically feasible, as is hoped, these reserves of frozen water can be used like a reservoir, where the surface would be obscured at the appropriate time, instead of opening the floodgates.”
Marangunic and his team’s experience intervening in glaciers to accelerate their thawing processes was not entirely new to Chile. During the severe drought of 1925, the engineer Hernán del Río was commissioned by the Maipo River Valley Water Board to experiment with explosives to accelerate the thawing of “eternal snows.” These experiments were carried out in Chile’s central region, very close to the country’s capital, in October 1925. Santiago’s El Diario Ilustrado (1924) reported on Del Río’s work, saying that “he carried out the necessary studies to see if it is possible to break up the eternal snows in the mountains, should it be necessary.” These studies involved the use of explosives and determined that ten cubic meters of snow could be moved with a kilo of dynamite, which in turn implied the runoff of two cubic meters of water (Ministerio de Obras Públicas Reference Ministerio1924). While the cost of explosives discouraged scaling up the initiative in 1925, it is interesting to note that this earlier experimentation also falls within the logic of an anthropocentric view prior to the evidence of the effects of climate change globally and in Chile.
Returning to the case of Marangunic, and as highlighted in previous work, his initiatives implemented at the time to artificially increase the presence of water efforts resonated strongly with the values that drove the global struggle for control over natural resources during the Cold War (Purcell Reference Purcell2022). In such a struggle, playing God with nature, regardless of its vulnerability and recalcitrance, would become feasible through geoengineering (Hamilton Reference Hamilton2013). It was precisely this spirit that gave rise to what earth systems sciences call the “great acceleration” during the second half of the twentieth century, a process through which several development indicators began to surge that correlate with an increased concentration of atmospheric carbon and rising global temperatures.
The passive understanding of nature typical of the Cold War was precisely based on an anthropocentric view, according to which, as already noted, nature was characterized by unlimited abundance and humanity by a capacity to command it. Regarding glaciers, this view was limited to understanding them as solid and perennial entities harking back to a time before humanity and suspended beyond the passage of history. This was indeed the case in Chile, where until recently glaciers tended to be seen as a scenic background, a foundation of social life through which the nation defined its identity, an idea embodied in national symbols such as the flag or the anthem. This is perhaps best illustrated with the government’s choice, thirty years ago, to transport giant pieces of an Antarctic glacier to represent Chile at the 1992 International Expo in Seville (Dümmer Reference Dümmer2026).Footnote 8 This feat contrasts radically with the growing concern for glaciers, which are now understood as vulnerable entities, not only in Chile but around the world. For instance, in 2014, the contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson staged Ice Watch, an installation of a series of icebergs from the Arctic outside the Copenhagen City Hall to commemorate, with the ice melting, the publication of the fifth report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
More than six decades after his early experiments to melt glaciers, Marangunic’s proposals to geoengineer glaciers to mitigate the impact of mining are undoubtedly familiar with the irreversible effects of global warming on glaciers. And yet they have somehow retained a passive view of nature and a corresponding understanding of humans as commanders of it, a continuity that can arguably be identified to varying—and potentially contradictory—degrees in all geoengineering efforts. This is particularly true of proposals to macro-geoengineer climate at a global scale, some of which have been contemplated by the very same intellectuals responsible for popularizing the Anthropocene concept, such as that of Crutzen (Reference Crutzen2002). As the historian Clive Hamilton (Reference Hamilton2013) has argued, contemporary proposals to fix climate change through geoengineering assume that technology will allow humans to remain Earth’s masters and return to the unusual climatic stability of the Holocene, when human civilization flourished. Accordingly, even though contemporary proposals might be driven partially by an awareness of planetary limits, they often also retain the assumptions that humans have an exceptional capacity to dominate nature and reverse Earth’s processes to keep the planet within those limits. Yet as the geographer Mike Hulme (Reference Hulme2014) reminds us, such proposals are fundamentally uncertain in terms of their material effects, precisely because they are beyond human control.
Detachable glaciers
Barrick’s and Andina’s management strategies for glaciers strikingly resemble commonly proposed relocation plans for managing organic species in environmental impact assessments, as when hydroelectric development projects threaten to inundate whole valleys. As in glacier geoengineering proposals, initiatives to relocate organic species have been implemented in the hopes that they will subsequently recouple to the environment to form a new totality. Arguably, this notion of relocation responds to a particular understanding of organic species, commonly associated with the neo-Darwinian synthesis, according to which the life trajectory of an organism is specified in the gene prior to the organism’s encounter with its environment. The anthropologist Tim Ingold (Reference Ingold2000) has described this view as the myth of the genotype, a narrative that tends to dissociate evolution and development, understanding them as independent trajectories that unfold in an orthogonal sense. Whereas evolution occurs through the vertical transmission of information previously coded in genes, development unfolds horizontally as the posterior deployment of the pre-encoded inheritance in the gene, in interaction with an environment. Protecting species under this logic involves preserving the former, or the pure information contained in the gene, regardless of the messy encounter with the environment in which species have coevolved, an assumption that fails from the viewpoint of the ecology of life.
A similar logic of abstraction has operated in the scientific reduction of chemical species, the isolation of which has historically depended on mining techniques for purifying minerals, which aim to isolate them from the messy surrounding environment in which they form (Ingold Reference Ingold2020, 128). Laboratory research on the molecular constitution of matter more generally, including water, has followed roughly a similar process of isolation of chemical compounds (Chang Reference Chang2012). Accordingly, the relocation of a chemical species could also seem compelling, particularly to those holding onto the historical tendency in science to conceive of matter as passive. Yet proposals to relocate glaciers in Chile were met with shock from both lay citizens and members of the scientific community, including important Chilean glaciologists and some of the engineers who were directly involved in Pascua-Lama operations (Li Reference Li2011). Similarly, for some of the activists advancing the interests of the communities downstream—including the Diaguitas Huascoaltinos, whose memories of the landscape related to the long-term existence of glaciers—the proposal was seen as “an insult to [their] intelligence” (French et al. Reference French, Javiera, Costanza, Christian, Mark, John J. and Andreas2015, 320).
The legislation proposed in response to the controversies surrounding Barrick’s proposal adopted an emphatic opposition to seeing glaciers as entities that can be preserved regardless of their environment and could therefore be successfully relocated. In its original 2006 formulation, the Horvath Bill offered an ecosystemic understanding of glaciers that was expanded in the 2019 Girardi Bill, which stated the need to protect both the periglacial and permafrost environments on which glaciers depend. This was further elaborated with the contributions of experts, such as those of the Independent Panel of Cryosphere Science Researchers. In an interview with the environmental nongovernmental organization Ladera Sur, Sebastián Crespo stated that “glaciers are not ice cubes isolated from the landscape,” a comment that stressed the need to protect the glacier environment and implicitly excluded the possibility of relocating them (Díaz Levi Reference Díaz Levi2021). Ultimately, the ecosystemic view of ESS, the framework responsible for introducing the cryosphere concept, suggested an interconnectivity that prevents compartmentalizing the environment into discrete elements.
Significant as this is, the ecosystemic view of the Horvath and subsequent Girardi bills hides an even more radically organic conception of glaciers that further prevents their compartmentalization from the environment. According to it, glaciers are not simply material substrates of a larger ecosystem; they constitute organic ecosystems in themselves that are worthy of preserving in their uniqueness. This position was explicitly called into question by the prestigious glaciologist Andrés Rivera, Casassa’s successor as director of the glaciology department at the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia. Summoned by the Environment and National Assets Committee for his expert testimony in the context of the debate on Horvath’s bill, Rivera said in 2006 that it was inappropriate to view glaciers as ecosystems, as only microorganisms inhabited them (Comisión de Medio Ambiente y Bienes Nacionales 2006, 20). At that time, research on glaciers as complex and habitable ecosystems, advanced by astrobiology, was just taking off.
Defining glaciers as ecosystems speaks of an organic view that contrasts with the way that glaciers have traditionally been defined, usually with reference to their dynamics (in motion) and composition (water in solid state), that is, from a perspective based on physics and chemistry, disciplines commonly devoted to the study of inert matter. This perspective underlies most contemporary definitions of glaciers used by relevant national and international institutions involved in monitoring glaciers, including the Chilean General Water Board, in charge of Chile’s National Glacier Inventory, or the United States Geological Survey, to name some examples.Footnote 9 This perspective also underlies definitions used by glaciologists currently advancing glacier geoengineering in Chile (Marangunic Reference Marangunic2022).
A traditional emphasis on physics and chemistry in the definition of a glacier in Chile and elsewhere is unsurprising. Since its foundation by thinkers like John Tyndall, the history of the scientific study of glaciers has traditionally been dominated by experimental physics. This trend in Chile was to be consummated by the man who is often considered the father of modern glaciology and founder of glaciology studies in the country: Louis Lliboutry (Reference Lliboutry1987) took on the task of physically describing glacier dynamics, including paradoxes associated with the fact that glaciers behave like solids that flow. The understanding of these paradoxes during the previous century had been partially linked to the laboratory study of ice by prestigious physicists, such as Michael Faraday (Simonetti Reference Simonetti2022).
However, in the past decade, cryobiology has burst onto the glacier study scene, challenging existing disciplinary hierarchies in glaciology, where the so-called hard sciences predominated over soft ones, each dedicated, respectively, to inert and living matter. Biology has shown that glaciers can indeed constitute organic ecosystems, inasmuch as they are not just inhabited by abundant and heterogeneous microorganisms on the surface and in their interior, from all three domains of life (Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryotes). At the same time, these microscopic ecosystems coexist with algae and worms, which larger animals like birds might feed on (Hodson et al. Reference Hodson, Alexandre M., Martyn, Andrew, Mark, John, Johanna and Birgit2008; Boetius et al. Reference Boetius, Alexandre M., Jody W., Jill A. and Josephine Z.2015). Contrary to the traditional conception of ice as a solid and aseptic barrier to life, glaciers are now known to constitute fertile environments (Simonetti Reference Simonetti2022). Notably, when it comes to glacier geoengineering, proposals have not studied the unforeseen consequences to life within and around glaciers (Battin et al. Reference Battin, Albert, Brigit, Alexandre M., Joseph, Matthias and Arwyn2025). Perhaps the best evidence of the risks associated with glacier geoengineering is that some of the current proposals for their artificial regeneration involve the possibility of bombarding them with bacteria, whose freezing capacities have been described as partially responsible for their regeneration (Tsang Reference Tsang2019).
Taking the possible repercussions of the biological view of glaciers seriously involves questioning a mechanized view of glaciers that underlies geoengineering proposals, dominated by modern physics and chemistry. From an ecosystem viewpoint, life’s heterogeneity is nowadays considered unique in its formation, a forward-advancing historical process that is by definition irreversible. As the physicist Ilya Prigogine and the philosopher Isabel Stengers (Reference Prigogine and Isabelle1984) argue in their book Order Out of Chaos, the contrast between the mechanized view of physics, from before the emergence of thermodynamics and quantum physics, from Newton to Einstein, and the emergence of an historical view of life on Earth, which was advanced by disciplines in the natural sciences during the nineteenth century, particularly geology and biology, is marked by a tension between contrasting visions of change as reversible and irreversible, predicated on entities that are homogeneous (inert matter) and heterogeneous (organic matter) by definition (also Bergson Reference Bergson1998).
As the inhabitants of glacial territories or the very glaciologists we have talked to while engaged in this research tend to note, each glacier seems to be a singularity in Earth’s history, with unique shapes, dynamics, sounds, and aromas, an experience that goes beyond the measurement of purely physical variables and could ultimately be confirmed by biology. Significant gestures coming from the glaciological international community suggest a spread of similar understandings of glaciers, which are sensitive to their ecological singularity and contrast with traditional mechanical definitions. Calls to protect glaciers have given rise to narratives that refer to them as living entities. For instance, studies of mass balance, in a global warming context, now often refer to glaciers’ growth, health, and adaptation (Carey Reference Carey2007). In response, glaciologists around the world have started to mourn glaciers, as in Okjökull, the first glacier in Iceland to lose its status. This event was commemorated in August 2019 with a memorial addressed to future generations that attributed responsibility to global carbon emissions for the loss (Howe and Boyer Reference Howe and Dominic2024).
These political gestures, as geographer Jeremy Schmidt (Reference Schmidt2021) suggests, resonate with how indigenous societies of the cryosphere have suffered and reacted to ecosystem loss caused by global industrial activity. This includes, for instance, anticolonial claims by Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier (Reference Watt-Cloutier2015) in her book, A Right to Be Cold. Yet the disappearance of ice in cryosphere communities—including the Inuit for whom sea ice has been historically conceived of as a nurturing environment (Nuttall Reference Nuttall, Susan and Mark2009; Simonetti and Ingold Reference Simonetti and Ingold2018)—is not simply about geological extinction, as Schmidt proposes, as if what is at stake is to apply the concept of extinction to the inorganic matter that sustains life. As for ESS and the still emerging view of glaciers as habitable ecosystems in cryobiology, for these communities the disappearance of ice has been, from the very outset, a matter of geo-organic extinction, involving the disappearance not just of frozen water but the irreversible extinction of entangled webs of cohabitants that together inhabit cold environments.
However, earth science’s recent awareness of the participation of human collective action on the precarious ecological balance of the cryosphere not only resonates but also contrasts with traditional indigenous knowledge of societies whose form of life has grown alongside glaciers. Crucial is how their perspectives on earth processes tend to differ. ESS, for instance, has generally cultivated a distanced (planetary) view of earth processes, informed by the development of satellite imaging under the auspices of the space race, which tends to contrast with the situated understanding of environmental change that indigenous communities have traditionally cultivated (Morgan and Simonetti Reference Morgan, Cristián, Emily, William San, Mark and Sandra2024; Simonetti Reference Simonetti2019a). Similarly, as anthropologists and archaeologists of high latitudes and altitudes have also demonstrated, awareness of human irreversible affection of glaciers is not recent news for indigenous societies of the cryosphere. They have been conscious, for time immemorial, of the entangled bond between nature and society, passing generationally the wisdom that human disrespect can have an impact on glaciers, entities that are often valued for their singularity. For instance, as the anthropologist Julie Cruikshank (Reference Cruikshank2005) has demonstrated, for the Tlingit and Athabascan societies of Alaska and Yukon, glaciers are animated and responsive beings that actively participate in human social life, reacting morally, particularly to acts of human disrespect. Correspondingly, according to the anthropologist Karin Gagné (Reference Gagné2019), for Ladakh society in northwestern India, Himalayan glaciers have historically participated in extended relations of reciprocity generated through daily social practices that nurture a complex ethics of care, and that is currently being threatened by a progressive militarization of the region, advancing in a global warming context.
Although less explored in the literature, a corresponding understanding of how humans and glaciers relate to one another can be traced historically and contemporarily to indigenous communities in Chile, including Kawésqar and Yámana societies. These nomadic canoers, who roamed the glacial fjords of the southern Pacific coasts, from the Taitao Peninsula down to Cape Horn, understood glaciers as imbued with potentially harmful spirits, on whose presence humans were required to conduct themselves with respect (García Reference García1871; Emperaire [Reference Emperaire1955] 2002; Zárraga Reference Zárraga2022, 48; see also Simonetti Reference Simonetti, C., J. and J.2026). For these societies, as for indigenous societies across the Andes, an entanglement of humans and earth processes, as well as an understanding of the land as populated by sentient beings—therefore composed by more than inert matter—is not a recent phenomenon (Cadena Reference Cadena2015; Bacigalupo et al. Reference Bacigalupo, Guillermo Salas, Karsten, Georgina, Karine and Mabel2021; Ceruti Reference Ceruti2020). A transition from an anthropocentric to a planetary relationship with nature in the science of glaciology, on which this article has concentrated, and that now precludes a conception of glaciers as detachable from their environment, belongs to the particular intellectual trajectory of modern science and its dominating narrative of humans as the superior species, a view that consolidated mostly throughout the European Enlightenment.Footnote 10
Concluding remarks
A transition from an inert to an organic view of glaciers, corresponding to a passage from an anthropocentric to a planetary understanding of the place humans occupy in Earth’s history, can be identified in Chilean glaciology. These transitions belong to global scientific networks that historically transcend national boundaries. Although formally incommensurable, the contrast and transition between these perspectives should be seen as neither definitive nor abrupt. A plurality of ways of understanding humanity’s place in nature tend to coexist historically at different periods in science, particularly at the crossroads of paradigm shifts, as traditional perspectives are forced to accommodate new ones. Glaciology in Chile and elsewhere, like any other discipline, is neither monolithic nor isolated from surrounding influences, including forms of knowledge whose understandings of nature might contrast with the logic of extractivism. Environmental conflicts, unfolding since the Pascua-Lama controversy, have contributed to mobilize planetary environmental concerns that force scientists and engineers to contemplate new ethical dimensions that can make the preservation of glaciers incommensurable with immediate economic return on investment (Li Reference Li2011).
However, a knowledge core seems to prevail among defenders of traditional views of glaciers as inert substances, made of frozen water, the melting of which can potentially be reverted to preanthropogenic standards through geoengineering. Unfortunately, the idea that glaciers constitute “complex ecosystems” was eliminated from the Girardi Bill during its passage through the Mining and Energy Committee and was inexplicably replaced by the suggestion that glaciers are “complex systems.” This change suggests the advance of an understanding that glaciers are abiotic components of larger ecosystems, to which they belong and are tributaries of, but that they are not unique ecosystems in themselves. This reveals that the physicochemical view of glaciers is once again gaining ground versus the organic perspective, which is not at all surprising considering the difficulty entailed in protecting glaciers from their organic uniqueness. Ultimately, a physicochemical definition of glaciers currently guides their inventory and protection. Adding an organic and inherently ecosystemic understanding of how glaciers are actually formed would require transcending the satellite mapping currently used for their inventory and protection with an environmental impact assessment system capable of studying each glacier in its uniqueness on the ground; something undoubtedly unaffordable to the centralized perspective with which the state has historically managed and protected nature and its subjects (Scott Reference Scott1998). Microscopic ecosystems are vulnerable not just to direct human intervention through geoengineering but also indirect impacts from mining activities, including air pollution (Battin et al. Reference Battin, Albert, Brigit, Alexandre M., Joseph, Matthias and Arwyn2025).
Correspondingly, tensions like those described for the processing of a glacier bill in Chile recently resurfaced during the failed constitutional process that concluded in 2023. The first—drafted by a commission composed of 155 elected members and initially led by the Mapuche intellectual Elisa Loncón—mentioned glaciers at least five times, guaranteeing their total protection. As stated in articles 137 and 146: “The state guarantees the protection of glaciers and the glacial environment, including permafrost and their ecosystem functions,” meaning that they were “excluded from all mining activities” (Convención Constitucional Reference Convención2022, 47–50). Contrastingly, the second constitutional proposal—rejected in December 2023 and generated by a joint commission, which included twenty-five experts appointed by Congress and fifty elected members, most of whom represented the right-wing Partido Republicano—left the door open to the granting of private rights over their waters, going against a recent amendment to the current Water Code preventing such concessions, which was approved in 2022. According to the proposed constitutional text, water in any of its states and natural sources (including those in solid state, such as snow, glaciers and permafrost) would be recognized as a good for public use, on which “water use rights could be constituted or recognized, granting their holders the right to use them and allowing these rights to be disposed of, assigned and transferred” (in Moraga and Bórquez Reference Moraga and Roxana2023; see also Simonetti Reference Simonetti2023).
As in the case of the law, protecting glaciers in their unrepeatable ecological uniqueness would require transcending the anthropocentrism imbued in the current Chilean constitution, whose principles the most recent proposal to replace it only sought to intensify, and according to which glaciers are seen as a resource—mere water in a solid state—for human consumption. Putting humanity at the center of attention ignores the thousands of microorganisms and other species that inhabit the ice, whose evolution is partially responsible for life as we know it today, including human life. To protect glaciers is also to protect the biodiversity that inhabits glacier ecosystems, which science still knows little about. Geoengineering proposals to save or create glaciers can have catastrophic, irreversible consequences for glacier ecosystems and the organisms that inhabit them. This is true of all geoengineering initiatives, including those beyond glacier relocation, on which this article has concentrated. To briefly mention some examples, geotextiles can limit sunlight or nutrient absorption at the surface of glaciers, and artificial snow can add foreign organisms, upsetting the delicate balance of glacier ecosystems. Ignoring this reality undoubtedly involves risks, which have been so far overlooked by glacier geoengineering efforts and proposals. Glaciers are not simply blocks of ice, and their protection must not ignore their biota, as glaciers are inherently alive.
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