IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB154548016

Vertical Glaciology: The Second Discovery of the Third Dimension in Climate Research (2020)

Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Volume: 62
Issue: 4
Pages: 720-743
Publication date: 2020
Language: English

URI: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1600-0498.12294

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12294

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

The history of climate research in the 20th century has been characterised by a crucial shift from a geography-oriented, two-dimensional approach towards a physics-based, three-dimensional concept of climate. In the 1930s, the introduction of new technology, such as radiosondes, enabled climatologists to investigate the high atmosphere, which had previously been out of reach. This “conquest of the third dimension” challenged the surface-oriented, geographical notion of climate patterns and opened up climatology to a three-dimensional approach, which deeply changed the character of climate research. Two decades later, by drilling deep into polar glaciers and using the downward vertical dimension as an archive of the earth's history, ice core scientists began to reconstruct past climates layer by layer. The data retrieved in deep glacial layers contributed crucially to a temporal expansion of climate history far beyond human timescales. However, the inaccessibility of glaciers and the practical challenges of bringing fragile fragments of ice into transnational networks of scientific exchange meant that this vertical extension of climate knowledge production proceeded through a range of new scientific practices, and was shaped by new forms of international collaboration. Furthermore, this vertical approach to glaciers also asked for a new understanding of glacier volume. Drawing on archival and printed sources, I argue that ice core research represented a second discovery of the third dimension, this time downwards into the depth of the earth's surface, but again with decisive consequences for the research practice, for collaboration politics, and for understandings of climate, spatially as well as temporally.

...More

Included in

Article Wilko Graf von Hardenberg; Martin Mahony (2020) Introduction—up, down, Round and Round: Verticalities in the History of Science. Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology (pp. 595-611). unapi

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB154548016

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Chapter Jamie Wood; Janet Wilmshurst; Rewi Newnham; Matt McGlone; (2017)
Evolution and Ecological Change During the New Zealand Quaternary (/p/isis/citation/CBB260017387/)

Article Jordan D. II Marché; (2018)
Edward Hitchcock, Roderick Murchison, and rejection of the alpine glacial theory (1840-1845) (/p/isis/citation/CBB113445617/)

Chapter Guglielmina Adele Diolaiuti; (2022)
Quando il ghiaccio glaciale incontra il fuoco del vulcano: dalla geografia alla letteratura (/p/isis/citation/CBB377165446/)

Chapter James Shulmeister; (2017)
Blowing on the West Wind. The Most Recent Quaternary Glaciation of New Zealand (/p/isis/citation/CBB507412215/)

Article David Fedman; Martin Hood; (2019)
Hotly Debated Ice: Scholar Alpinism and the Great Glacier Controversy in Modern Japan (/p/isis/citation/CBB097532171/)

Article Hulme, Mike; (2010)
Claiming and Adjudicating on Mt. Kilimanjaro's Shrinking Glaciers: Guy Callendar, Al Gore and Extended Peer Communities (/p/isis/citation/CBB001034650/)

Article Sörlin, Sverker; (2009)
Narratives and Counter-Narratives of Climate Change: North Atlantic Glaciology and Meteorology, c.1930--1955 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001034159/)

Article Sörlin, Sverker; (2011)
The Anxieties of a Science Diplomat: Field Coproduction of Climate Knowledge and the Rise and Fall of Hans Ahlmann's “Polar Warming” (/p/isis/citation/CBB001034574/)

Thesis Carey, Mark Palmer; (2005)
People and Glaciers in the Peruvian Andes: A History of Climate Change andNatural Disasters, 1941--1980 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001561584/)

Article Knight, Peter G.; (2004)
Glaciers: Art and History, Science and Uncertainty (/p/isis/citation/CBB000551109/)

Article Cooper, Barry J.; (2010)
“Snowball Earth”: The Early Contribution from South Australia (/p/isis/citation/CBB001031250/)

Book Dansgaard, Willi; (2004)
Frozen Annals: Greenland Ice Sheet Research (/p/isis/citation/CBB000650192/)

Book Amrith, Sunil S; (2013)
Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421571/)

Article Rudy Michael Baum; (2019)
Taking the Earth's Temperature: 200 years of research has established why the Earth is as warm as it is and how burning fossil fuels is making it warmer (/p/isis/citation/CBB533391308/)

Article Morgan, Ruth A.; (2013)
Histories for an Uncertain Future: Environmental History and Climate Change (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201446/)

Article McNeill, J. R.; (2014)
President's Address: Toynbee as Environmental Historian (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420324/)

Article Hulme, Mike; (2011)
Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism (/p/isis/citation/CBB001034583/)

Article Laura J. Martin; (2023)
The Yale Geochronometric Laboratory and the Rewriting of Global Environmental History (/p/isis/citation/CBB197231151/)

Thesis Cushman, Gregory Todd; (2003)
The Lords of Guano: Science and the Management of Peru's Marine Environment, 1800--1973 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001562088/)

Book Cruikshank, Julie; (2005)
Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (/p/isis/citation/CBB000740952/)