Knowing ice, Differently

By Flora M. Bartlett 02/06/20

Glaciers have become key sites of meaning in the emerging discourses of climate change, becoming ‘a cryospheric weather vane for potential natural and social upheaval’ (Cruikshank 2005: 6). When turning our attention to how they are experienced and given in meaning in place, we can also explore the tension in different ways of knowing ice. After all, there are many different ways to know ice in the context of changing climates - be it as a local resident or a scientific researcher (Cruikshank 2005; Henshaw 2003; Wohlforth 2004). Using photography alongside reflections from my fieldwork (2017-18) I explore some very different ways of knowing ice in Arjeplog, in the rural sub-arctic north of Sweden, where Sweden’s largest glacier Sálajiegna is painstakingly documented by some and largely ignored by others. What this reveals is a duality in ice knowledge in the region: the scientific and historical interest in a melting glacier versus the everyday lived experience of lake ice for tradition and industry.

Sálajiegna is a 2000 cubic metre glacier in the Arjeplog municipality and has been melting with increasing rapidity due to the warming climate. Local journalist and student of history Maria Söderberg has been documenting the melt along with Stockholm University Glaciologist Per Holmlund [1] (Söderberg 2017, 2018; Holmlund 2012; see Hofman 2014) . Together they host helicopter tours up to the glacier followed by a lecture at Vuoggatjålme, the Arctic circle camp north of the town, to communicate the research to scientists and citizens.

I arrived in Arjeplog in July 2017 for my PhD fieldwork, and soon after my arrival I joined Maria and Per at Vuoggatjålme, along with a group of smartly dressed guests including two journalists (one local, one national) with recording equipment and large digital cameras. I missed the chance to book a helicopter spot and instead stayed behind on the ground, waving off the helicopter as it  ascended into the summer sky towards the mountains. Later we reconvened in one of the cabins for the slideshow and lecture by Per. 

He set up the projector, laptop, and screen, and stood before the assembled group,  discussing the rate of melting. He showed side by side images of the glacier over time and the speed at which it was retreating, creating new lakes and revealing previously hidden landscapes . Graphs flashed up on screen and the atmosphere in the room was one of intense concentration; brows furrowed in concern and all eyes pinned to the projections dancing from the lens.

 This lecture felt like an ‘aha’ moment at the time. I came to Arjeplog to explore landscape, nature, and emplaced climate change: to see if the latter was discussed and how it was physically effecting the region. And here was a group of people discussing just such a change. 

But later I wondered.

While there was certainly national interest in the glacier, back in town and among my participants Sálajiegna was rarely mentioned. When I later interviewed one of the tour’s participants, a local journalist, she mentioned how many in Arjeplog were not really aware of the glacier. Though accessible by snowmobile, or a long hike, it seemed to be outside of the usual scope of travel. She herself had not thought about it much before the trip. It was far away in the mountains, not along the usual snowmobile routes or individual summer cabins. Some of my friends in the field had helped Maria, going to the glacier to carve a piece of the ice which she then took to Stockholm alongside her photographs to communicate how Sálajiegna is melting. Otherwise, it was seldom discussed in everyday life during my fieldwork.

Residents were busy measuring their own (more local) ice. Arjeplog municipality boasts more than 8000 lakes, closely examined in winter for their weight-bearing potential: for the weight of cars, snowmobiles, or of footsteps heading out to lay nets for ice fishing.  Comments on the thickness and structure of the ice were left on local Facebook forums. The ice growth is also painstakingly measured  for the main local industry of winter car testing. During the winter season, Arjeplog’s small population doubles and becomes home to 3000+ engineers from all around the world coming to test new car models on the frozen lakes before releasing them to the international market. This industry involves precision measuring of lake ice, either through processes of embodied knowledge – feeling the quality and depth of the ice with their bare hands –  or using a radar pulled behind a vehicle (Bartlett 2020;  Andersen and Bartlett 2019). The tracks are then prepared using tractors and large trucks, sometimes filled with water to spray over the surface to give a slippery texture for the engineers to test on.

The Sami residents of Arjeplog who are engaged in reindeer herding [2]  pay attention to both lake ice (for fishing and for the seasonal movements of the reindeer) and to the ice forming on land after rainfall as it traps the food for their reindeer who then starve, unable to break through the frozen crust as the climate changes (see also Furberg et al 2011).

These various local processes involve many different practices of measuring and ‘knowing’ ice intimately (see O’Reilly 2016), in everyday lived experience of both dwelling in and sensing landscape (Ingold 2000; Tilley 2004), and embodying the risks of stepping out onto the surfaces of the ice and drilling into its depths or tracking reindeers’ nourishment through winter. As the researchers and scientists document the absence of glacial ice, those who work with the tracks measure and document the presence of lake ice throughout the winter season. Their lives depend upon it and entire trucks can fall through if the ice gives way (Bartlett 2020). Likewise, stepping onto the ice to lay out fishing nets requires an embodied knowledge of its weight-bearing potential. Miscalculating the strength of ice at different points in the lake means the risk of plunging through and getting stuck, submerged in freezing temperatures.

Focussing on the particular element of ice as a site of knowledge reveals an interesting divide in ways of knowing within one municipality: scientific and historical expertise, and local, everyday experience. Entwined with these different sites of knowledge, this focus also reveals different encounters with climate change.

Of course, glacial ice and lake ice are not the same substance: their materiality is dependent on their environments and age, with lake ice only months old compared to the aged core of the glacier. Sálajiegna also occupies a much bigger scale in time and size than the seasonal lake ice, which varies year on year. While both can be measured in relation to the effects of climate change, locals are waiting to see a trend in the lake ice growth but can only view this between October and May. Sálajiegna, in contrast, can be measured and photographed each year, and a clear retreat can be seen from the images of new lakes emerging and a dramatic change in landscape over a long period.

Very few of the Arjeplogare with whom I spoke linked the lake ice with climate change during my fieldwork. The winter before I arrived had been warm, with meltwater covering the ice on the major lakes and causing trouble for the car testing. Some said that it had been concerning but, until they saw a trend, many said they would not categorise it as climate change. Many told me how there had always been warm years in Arjeplog, the new ice fluctuated year-on-year.  While at least one of the companies was preparing for warmer climates, building more cold chambers and tracks on land, some other locals who work with the tracks maintained that winters have always been unpredictable and so far it is hard to see clearer trends besides a slightly prolonged autumn season.

There is no direct route between scientific knowledge and its reception in terms of climate change, and its response hinges in part on its form (Callison 2014). In a forthcoming article I discuss how climate change was a threatening discourse in Arjeplog, revealing and reinforcing turbulence between the rural community and the perceived interferences of the urban south, in a long history of resource extraction in the region (Bartlett, in press). It is understandable that people did not want to discuss climate change when one considers the conflict entangled within the discourse (ibid). When asking people in Arjeplog about climate change, however, I did often hear: ‘I think if you asked [local journalist and host of the glacier tours] Maria, she is interested in climate change, she could talk about it’. Or -  ‘ask the Sami [2], they know about climate change.’ This topic was therefore often associated with those working with the glacier, or those working with reindeer herding - whom some people suggested lived ‘closer to nature’ given their seasonal migration, seen more a part of the natural world than the seasonal car testing industry and therefore possibly more attuned to climate change [3].

The glacial ice in particular has thus become a site of research, drawing interest from research communities, while the lake ice remained a part of the everyday work of Arjeplog and its industry. Visitors came from Sweden and abroad to use both, but for different ways. And often those in Arjeplog whom I interviewed were focussed more on knowing the local ice rather than measuring the melt of the glacier. The two kinds of ice therefore seem to occupy two very different realms of engagement: the research into climate change at Sálajiegna on the one hand, and local knowledge of the lake ice for more practical reasons on the other.

In her book exploring glacial encounters, Julie Cruikshank encourages us to listen to different stories – listening to ‘Grandpa’, as she suggests, as well as to the scientists (2005:76). Looking at different perspectives of glaciers and of ice more generally in Arjeplog broadened my understanding of relationships to landscape in Arjeplog and strengthened my understanding of climate change as an outside discourse – one not yet felt by the people with whom I worked most, and associated with something other than everyday lived experience in the region.

I have endeavoured to show how the substances of ice are experienced diversely in one community in Sweden. A melting glacier can be a material shock of climate change for researchers and historians witnessing its retreat year-on-year and the new absences of ice, and for others in the same municipality the same glacier can be a distant place with little bearing on the everyday experience of landscape.  With the local industry relying on the sub-zero winter temperatures, the risk to the local economy is threatened more by melting lake ice than by a glacier. And as of yet, this is not a risk willing to be discussed. Instead, the focus among those with whom I worked was on the presence of ice. My participants in Arjeplog depend upon that ice for work, for building the ice tracks, driving snowmobiles, fishing and industry. Their lifestyles depend more on knowing the lake ice than knowing the ice of Sálajiegna. The various ways of knowing ice thus occupy different scales of encounter within one municipality, and have very different meanings for the everyday lives of its inhabitants.

Notes

[1] see also The Bolin Centre for Climate Research, the division of Stockholm University focusing on climate and glacial research where research into this glacier is published.

 [2] It is important to note here that Sami is not a synonym for reindeer herders, and defining Sami as reindeer herders has been a problematic and deliberate manoeuvre by the state  (Lantto & Mörkenstam 2008). When people directed me to ‘the Sami’ in terms of climate change, they meant those who have reindeer in the region and therefore follow the seasons as they move their herds, rather than to Sami generally. I worked mostly with non-Sami residents of Arjeplog during my fieldwork given the problematic historical focus on ‘Sami’ lifestyles, as well as their own existing discussions of climate change in contemporary media and research.

[3] One acquaintance in Arjeplog told me that the Swedish meteorological association had been speaking to the Sami residents about climate change for the last 10 years, especially with regards to reindeer herding and the coming vulnerabilities they would face (and now are facing). Some Sami villages have also been vocal in local and national media about the risks of climate change to their cultural heritage and lifestyles.

[4] I would like to thank everyone in Arjeplog for their time and patience both during and after my fieldwork. I would also like to thank CHASE and the AHRC for supporting this research.

About

Flora M. Bartlett is a photographer and PhD candidate in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University London. Her research interests include photographic ethnography, experimental methods, rural Sweden, landscape, nature, and climate change. She has also been an editor of Weather Matters since June 2019.

Works Cited

Bartlett, F.M. 2020. Interactions on Ice. In Arktiska Spår: natur och kultur i rörelse, edited by Lotten Gustafsson-Reinius. Nordiska förlag.

Bartlett, F.M. (In press). The Threat of Climate Change Discourses in Northern Sweden. Anthropology Matters.

Bartlett, F. and Andersen, C. 2018. Arjeplog [film in the exhibition Arktis: Medan Isen Smälter] at Nordiska Museet.

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