Ice Witnesses

The key witnesses to the fact that climate change is anthropogenic are non-human. Ice cores, in particular, document that the current increase in atmospheric carbon levels is unmistakably due to industrial activities. In our article we discuss how the significance of ice is not restricted to its function as a scientific climate proxy but encompasses ice as a natural archive, an elemental medium and as a material climate witness. When ice enters public forums (for example, by films or exhibitions), it shapes cultural memory and narratives of climate change. Following the becoming-witness of ice through different dimensions of natural-cultural memory, we discuss Susan Schuppli’s transdisciplinary work on ice as an expression of a conscious natural-cultural memory. In dialogue with her artistic project Learning from Ice and her concept of the “material witness”, we explore how witnessing the dynamics of climate change is not merely the capacity of the human or of the ice, but in fact emerges from their encounters

Climate change · Climate science · Global warming · Narrative · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions

• Listening to climate change

  Open Access•Janine Natalya Clark•Environmental Sociology•2026

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