Kitted out with ice picks, ropes, harnesses, crampons, carabiners, and trekking poles, they have been collecting information in high-altitude mountain ranges together since 2017, sometimes at elevations of 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) and higher. Frequently, their research destinations are rich in vista but poor in vegetation.<\/p>\n
The personal and professional lives of Weaver, a University of Rochester<\/a> professor of history, and Bakhmetyeva, a professor of instruction in the Department of History<\/a>\u00a0and the associate director of the University\u2019s Humanities Center<\/a>, regularly collide. Married for 13 years, the two often collaborate on projects rooted in the history of climate change. Their research alternatively takes them deep into historical archives or high atop mountain ranges, including the Austrian Alps in Europe, and the Himalayas and the Pamir Mountains in Asia.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople ask us all the time how we can live, work, and then travel together,\u201d Bakhmetyeva says with a laugh. \u201cFor us it\u2019s great.\u201d<\/p>\n Until the disruption caused by COVID-19, the couple had spent the summers of 2018 and 2019 collecting oral histories<\/a> from the people in Ladakh, a trans-Himalayan region in the far north of India that is experiencing drastic climate change at an extraordinary pace. In 2019, Weaver won funding as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>to work on the \u201cClimate Witness: Voices from Ladakh<\/a>\u201d project, an effort to preserve the rich culture and history of the locale and its people in oral history form\u2014before it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n In his Carnegie application, Weaver describes the harrowing backdrop to their research\u2014torrential rains that wrecked the region on August 5, 2010: \u201cA violent cloudburst dumped fourteen inches of rain on Ladakh, accustomed to getting just three inches of rain in a year.\u201d<\/p>\n The results in Leh, the main town, were catastrophic, he writes: 255 people killed, more than 800 injured, and thousands left homeless. Barely five years later, flooding recurred on an even wider scale, destroying buildings, roads, fields, and orchards all over the region.<\/p>\n Yet while Ladakh \u201csuffers from too much water, it also suffers from too little,\u201d says Weaver. Declining snowfall and glacial recession have diminished the region\u2019s water reserves and wreaked havoc on the local agriculture.<\/p>\n The couple\u2019s oral history work in Ladakh didn\u2019t go unnoticed. In 2021, together with Daniel Rinn<\/strong><\/a>, who had earned a PhD in history from the University a year earlier, their project<\/a> won the\u00a0Public Outreach Project Award<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0from the\u00a0American Society for Environmental History.<\/p>\n As a teenager, Weaver lived with his family for several years in New Delhi, where his father was posted as an educational consultant for a foundation. Mountain ranges beckoned.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been a hiker and mountain climber all my life,\u201d says Weaver\u2014first in the Himalayas with his family, later as an adult in the mountains of Wyoming, Colorado, California, and now Europe. He\u2019s been a keen reader of mountain and mountaineering literature as long as he can remember.<\/p>\n Weaver would later add to the genre himself, coauthoring with Maurice Isserman Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes<\/em><\/a> (Yale University Press, 2008).<\/em> The book not only won the National Outdoor Book Award for History and Biography that year, it also marked a departure from Weaver\u2019s previous research specialty of British history, which he taught at Rochester for many years.<\/p>\n \u201cIncreasingly over time, I\u2019ve become more interested in environmental history, the history of exploration, and now most recently, the history of exploration and science,\u201d Weaver explains. \u201cNow, I\u2019d say I\u2019m a historian of mountains and alpinism.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Bakhmetyeva\u2019s route to the mountains was slightly more winding. Born in Ukraine to Russian parents, she and her family moved back to what was then the Soviet Union, coming to the United States in 1995. Her first book<\/a> was about a Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 and her famous 19th-century Parisian salon. Today, Bakhmetyeva jokes that her academic interests have moved from the indoors to the outdoors.<\/p>\n At Rochester, she\u2019s taught a course on the politics of nature, focusing on issues of race, gender, and the environment. She has a particular research interest in ecofeminism, a branch of feminism that examines the interaction of gender and the environment.<\/p>\n Part of that research was a project about hunting. Specifically, Bakhmetyeva, a vegetarian, was writing about the role of hunting and nature<\/a> and its importance in Soviet diplomatic relationships under Nikita Khrushchev<\/a>, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964. Taking foreign leaders and diplomats on hunting expeditions, Soviet apparatchiks<\/em>\u00a0used these outings, she argues, to display their \u201cmarksmanship and physical prowess\u201d to present themselves to their foreign counterparts as \u201cpotent leaders and desired allies.\u201d<\/p>\n One day, while working in the office she shares with Weaver in the attic of their Rochester home, Bakhmetyeva was reading about a historical character, Nikolai Krylenko. Besides being a regular hunter in earlier times with Vladimir Lenin<\/a> (and as a Soviet politician proved one of the cruelest Russian Bolshevik revolutionaries), Krylenko was also a serious mountaineer who was a climbing leader in the famed 1928 German-Soviet Fedchenko expedition. Incidentally, that exploration was the first to survey the enormous Fedchenko\u00a0glacier completely, determine its course, and establish its astonishing length.\u00a0Her interest piqued, Bakhmetyeva kept reading. Soon she stumbled across a German climber-scientist, Richard Finsterwalder, whose name sounded somehow familiar.<\/p>\n She recalls, \u201cI tuned to Stewart and said, \u2018Wait, isn\u2019t this guy I\u2019m reading about here in the scientific mountain expedition one of your guys, too?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, Weaver had written about Finsterwalder decades earlier in the context of a 1934 German expedition to Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest mountain in the world, located in Pakistan-administered\u00a0Kashmir.<\/p>\n Finsterwalder would become the couple\u2019s first point of professional convergence.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom that we started unraveling the story of glaciers and it snowballed from there,\u201d says Bakhmetyeva. As the couple charted more environmental history projects, one geological feature in particular caught their attention\u2014ice.<\/p>\n \u201cOf all the ominous signs of our climate crisis, none has so strong a hold on the public imagination as the loss of ice, as the collapse of the polar ice sheets, and the ever-accelerating melt of the world\u2019s glaciers,\u201d the duo told fellow historians in 2023 at the History of Science Society meeting in Chicago.<\/p>\n In some respects, glaciers have become the latest endangered species, a bellwether of global warming. Climate scientists like to point out that ice has no political agenda\u2014it simply reacts to external forces. But the two Rochester historians argue for another dimension: \u201cGlaciers shape not just our physical landscapes, but also our social and cultural ones,\u201d says Weaver, noting that the ways in which societies have understood and interpreted glaciers have changed throughout history.<\/p>\n While climate scientists are documenting the physical loss of the world\u2019s glaciers and are racing to find ways to slow it, environmental historians like Bakhmetyeva and Weaver are collecting and preserving human history\u2014and the history of glacial science\u2014in the face of rapid climate change. The emerging area of inquiry has its own name: ice humanities, a term popularized by two academics, Klaus Dodds and Sverker S\u00f6rlin, in their book Ice Humanities<\/em>: Living, thinking and working in a melting world<\/em><\/a> (Manchester University Press, 2022).<\/p>\n It can be confusing, admits Bakhmetyeva, who says the couple has been asked numerous times \u201cwhat exactly\u201d they\u2014as historians\u2014have to do with glaciers, which seem to fall squarely into the purview of geologists and environmental scientists.<\/p>\n The new field, which belongs under the larger umbrella of the environmental humanities\u2014itself a consolidation of several fields that happened about 25 years ago\u2014is trying to advance knowledge of how glaciers (and with it snow, permafrost, sea ice, and icebergs) came to be understood, and to offer a cultural perspective on the role of glaciology (the study of glaciers) in climate studies. In other words, historians document the natural history of ice, its socio-historical importance, and the work of glacial scientists throughout the ages. \u201cIce humanities\u201d describes a plethora of humanistic inquiries by artists, historians, philosophers, and literary scholars alike, with the idea of throwing wide open the doors to scholarship that transcends the separate silos of classic academic disciplines and allows for meaningful transdisciplinary research.<\/p>\n Part of Weaver\u2019s and Bakhmetyeva\u2019s research, for example, seeks to answer how Tajiki people, and indigenous communities in general, think of glaciers, at times disconnected from the larger, global questions about climate change. How have they projected their own cultural history of Tajikistan onto the world\u2019s largest glaciers? What role do glaciers play in the cultural imagining of the Pamiri people?<\/p>\n Beyond the artistic and cultural meaning, the couple studies how glaciological knowledge was produced historically, how it gained scientific credibility, and what political forces shaped the study of glaciers as a distinct discipline.<\/p>\n Of particular interest to ice historians are key moments in the 19th and early 20th centuries that laid the foundation for modern glaciological and climate change research. One such moment, Weaver and Bakhmetyeva argue, was the emergence of scientific glacial mapping.<\/p>\n For Weaver, researching the history of glacial science marks a return to research he originally undertook nearly 20 years ago for Fallen Giants<\/em>. The name Finsterwalder keeps popping up again and again in the couple\u2019s research.<\/p>\n Avid outdoorsmen, mountaineers, and master glacial mappers, the Bavarian mathematician Sebastian Finsterwalder (1862\u20131951) and his son, Richard Finsterwalder (1899\u20131963), brought more than just their apt surname to the profession (the German root word \u201cfinster\u201d translates to \u201cdark\u201d or \u201cgloomy,\u201d while \u201cwald\u201d means \u201cforest\u201d). They also successfully applied improvements in early remote sensing technology to high-altitude photogrammetric surveying<\/a>, including using stereo photogrammetry from which they created early 3D images for their glacial cartography.<\/p>\n The elder Finsterwalder was the first to draw a topographically accurate map of a glacier, the Vernagtferner<\/a> in Austria, in 1889.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the moment when glaciers became scientific objects, and that glacier map became the basis for climate research, available for longitudinal studies,\u201d notes Bakhmetyeva. Indeed, glacial climate scientists today still refer to these 135-year-old Finsterwalder maps.<\/p>\n \u201cFor all their pioneering scientific photogrammetric accuracy, they came up with very beautiful maps that were informed by a deep knowledge of the older ways of rendering glaciers as beautiful, magnificently sublime things,\u201d says Weaver about the founding fathers of glacial cartography.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Bakhmetyeva, drawing on her background in gender studies, traces connections between early glacial science, glacial cartography, and an \u201cexplicitly masculinist ethos of heroic adventure\u201d in the Finsterwalders\u2019 work, which went beyond mere mapping.<\/p>\n \u201cTo earn authority as a glaciologist took becoming a mountaineer and putting one\u2019s body on the line as a vicarious scientific instrument,\u201d the duo argues in a forthcoming paper. Before the advent of photography, it also took becoming an artist to be able to preserve the evidence of firsthand observation, and to document the extent of glacial movement over time.<\/p>\n About a hundred years later, the Rochester historians are now retracing many of the Finsterwalders\u2019 physical expeditions and scientific contributions\u2014from the Alps, to the Himalayas, and Pamirs.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been to the very huts where the older Finsterwalder stayed, the very valleys that he hiked with his equipment to chart, survey, and map these glaciers,\u201d says Weaver. Being on site, he notes, provides meaningful context to the diaries of Sebastian Finsterwalder\u2019s Alpine excursions, maps, and diagrams. \u201cIt adds a whole new level of intuitive understanding and actual physical comprehension of the landscapes he explored,\u201d Weaver says.<\/p>\n The couple\u2019s latest research takes them to the remote Pamir Mountains, located mostly in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan with fringes that extend into Afghanistan, China, and Kyrgyzstan.<\/p>\n The mountains are home to thousands of glaciers, and it\u2019s difficult to overstate their importance as the region\u2019s natural water towers. According to NASA, nearly 90 percent<\/a> of people in Central Eurasia rely on melted mountain waters for agriculture, energy, and drinking water.<\/p>\n![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/glacier-historians-alps.jpg\")
From pastime to profession<\/h3>\n
![\"screenshot](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Climate-Witness-Voices-of-Ladakh-\u2013-An-Oral-History-Archive-1.png\")
\n<\/i> LISTEN: Visit the team\u2019s oral history archive Climate Witness: Voices of Ladakh<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n![\"two](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/glacier-historians.jpg\")
A new area of inquiry\u2014the \u2018ice humanities\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Vernagtferners-glacier-art.jpg\")
The founding fathers of glacial cartography<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"Archival](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Sebastian-Richard-Finsterwalder.jpg\")
![\"Archival](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/a-The-1889-map-of-Vernagtferner-showing-the-entire-glacier-in-large-scale-Der.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Vernagtferner-glacier.jpg\")
![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/glacier-historians-austria.jpg\")
Tracing the history of the Fedchenko Glacier<\/strong><\/h3>\n