Resilience, ice, and society: probing the timescales of human interactions with cryospheric change

Three Sisters
Three Sisters, Photo Credit, Mark Carey

Principal Investigators: Dave Sutherland (Earth Sciences); Mark Carey (Environmental Studies)

Project Summary: The world is losing glaciers and snow at ever-increasing rates, causing global-scale impacts from sea level rise to the reduction of alpine water supplies. Yet most research and planning around glacier change focuses on long-term ice loss, not short-term impacts that affect different social groups differently, and unequally, such as in water resource use, hydroelectricity, agriculture, tourism economies, hazards, recreation, and local fisheries. To tackle these issues outside of the iconic Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets requires a new geographic focus and a commitment to understanding how local stakeholders respond to glacier fluctuations and ice loss. This project is funding a postdoctoral scholar for two years to expand how we look at regional glacier change in the greater Northwest region and to build a network of scholars and partner institutions that will form the basis of a larger collaborative project in the near future.

The project’s postdoctoral researcher, Jeremy Trombley, is an anthropologist with a background in researching socio-ecological systems and how people understand and respond to changing environmental conditions. He has begun to investigate the ways that environmental agencies and communities in the Pacific Northwest think about their relationship with local glaciers and the disparate timescales of glacier change. Moving forward, his goal is to identify key stakeholders and specific case studies that showcase the diverse effects of and responses to glacier change in the region.

Other personnel and links:

Dave Sutherland's Oceans & Ice Lab:
https://www.oceanice.org/

Mark Carey's Glacier Lab:
https://glacierlab.uoregon.edu/