From obstacles to heritage: The shifting status of glaciers across 150 years of mining research

Abstract

While the cryosphere is deteriorating due to climate change, mining of critical minerals is expanding to supply the clean energy transition, often in glaciated regions. We explore the convergence of these trends through a systematic review of 93 articles from 1875 to 2023. Informed by the framework of the “hydrosocial cycle,” we attend to both material and epistemological links between mining and the cryosphere, as well as how these links have evolved over time. We organize this literature across four categories of glacier-mining interactions, which have tended to emerge chronologically as foci of scholarly research: (1) Glaciers as Obstacles to Mining, (2) Glaciers as Archives of Mining, (3) Mining Impacts and Dust, and (4) The Rise of Cryoactivism. For over a century, we find, mining activities helped shape not only the physical cryosphere, but also the production of discourses and scientific knowledge about it. Over the last two decades, research has undergone a shift from a predominant discourse of glaciers as “obstacles” to mining, towards a recognition of glaciers as “heritage” –sensitive, unique, and valuable ecosystems that mining may threaten. Our results demonstrate the need for research across a greater variety of locations, as well as more interdisciplinary research, to explicate the increasingly complex and widespread interactions between the cryosphere and mining. These findings also help illuminate some key environmental justice challenges of securing critical minerals for the clean energy transition.