Melting giants: the history of glaciology across Central Asia

Melting glaciers are often regarded as icons of climate change. But how were they viewed in the early days of glaciology and, more specifically, climate change research? When and how did scientific research of the Central Asian glaciers begin? And why is this still relevant for us today?

Angelina speaks to environmental historian and a historian of science Dr. Katja Doose about the history of glacier research in Central Asia. 

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The Eurasian Climate Brief is a podcast dedicated to climate issues in the region stretching from Eastern Europe to Russia down to the Caucasus and Central Asia.

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Dr. Katja Doose at the University of Fribourg:
https://www.unifr.ch/directory/en/people/334449/232f7

Prof. Mark Carey at the University of Oregon (mentioned in the conversation):
https://news.uoregon.edu/expert/mark-carey-environmental-studies-program-department-geography

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This episode is supported by n-ost, a media NGO and European Journalistic Network committed to cross-border and multi-prospective reporting, and made by:

• Boris Schneider, political economist. European Programme Manager at Clean Energy Wire CLEW (Berlin). Has worked as a specialist on Eastern European climate and energy topics, amongst others for n-ost and the German Economic Team.
• Angelina Davydova, environmental/climate journalist. Editor of the magazine Environment and Rights, co-host of the podcast The Day After Tomorrow (Posle Zavtra). Environmental projects coordinator with the Dialogue for Understanding e. V (Berlin). Fellow with the Institute for Global Reconstitution (Berlin). Observer of the UN climate negotiations (UNFCCC) since 2008. Expert/editor of the Ukraine War Environmental CUNFCCC) since 2008. Expert/editor of the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group.

Jingle: Natallia Kunitskaya (Mustelide)
Sound editing & mixing: Angelo Tripkovsky

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello and welcome back to the Eurasian Climate Brief, your podcast on climate stories in Central Asia. My name is Boris Schneider, and I'm being joined by my colleague Angelina Davidova today. Hi Angelina. Hi, Boris. Hey, and in this episode, we are going to look at the topic of glaciers in Central Asia. To be precise, we're going to speak to a very interesting environmental historian who will tell us about the history of glaciology in the region, the main findings of this research, which people were involved in it, and also why it is still relevant today.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Well, as I was preparing for the recording of this episode, I was thinking that we never had an episode which would be dealing with historic aspects of environmental or climate problems in the region. And this is the first one. And it feels very exciting. I've actually met Katja Dozer, our guest today, many years ago. I think we first met online. We co-authored one article together, and then we met in a number of conferences. And I kept telling Boris we've got to do an episode with Katya because like the research he's doing is like truly amazing, right? And finally we're doing it. So we'll be digging into history today. We'll be learning about various centuries, the way people, scientists, researchers went into Central Asia, how did they study glaciers, where they were coming from, how do we look at this research now from the current perspective? All these exciting questions hopefully will be answered in our interview today. And here we go. So very warm welcome to Katya Dose.

SPEAKER_02 1:57

My name is Katja Dose. I'm a historian. I mainly work on the intersection between environmental history and the history of science. I work on different projects, but one of my main projects is to write a book on the history of glacier science in Central Asia. This will be an environmental history, but I will speak about this later. I'm a junior professor at the University of Lyon in France, where I also teach environmental history to bachelor and master's students.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

So, Kaita, you've been doing a lot of research in environmental history, also the history of glacial research in Central Asia. So, how long have you been working on this topic and what brought you to this topic in the first place?

SPEAKER_02 2:38

Getting into the glacial research basically started when I got interested in studying the history of how climate change was addressed in the Soviet Union. So my PhD was on how the Soviet government responded and managed disasters. And I worked on the case study of the 1988 earthquake in Armenia. After that, I started doing a postdoc in Birmingham where I worked on a project on the history of climate science in the Soviet Union. So there I worked for a few years. And then I started a postdoc in Fribourg in Switzerland, where I also worked in a project, and this one was focused much more on glaciers in Central Asia. And I very much liked sort of to move a bit away from this, yeah, sort of very abstract or theoretical understanding of climate science, modeling, and all that to something more tangible, but which would still make me work on climate change, on how people understood and managed climate change before the story we all know today, yeah, especially with glaciers. So for the last five years, I've been working on the environmental history of glaciers and glacier science in Central Asia.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

If we look back into history, how long have climate change and glaciers in Central Asia been researched for? Who were the first researchers to start their work?

SPEAKER_02 3:51

This is actually also something very interesting. But like when I started the project, I knew nothing about this. It was very, very new to me. And so surprisingly, and maybe you'll be surprised too, so in Central Asia, the first real research on glaciers, the existence, the retreat, or the advance started around 1870, 1880. So this is when 1880 there was this very famous expedition by a geologist called Ivan Mushkietov. He also plays quite a big role in the beginning of my book. He was from St. Petersburg. He could not believe some of the reports that he has heard before, according to which glaciers were advancing, because he was very familiar with what people have been writing about the Alps in Europe and that they were actually retreating. So he kind of couldn't believe that in Central Asia this behavior of the glaciers was different. So he went to Central Asia for many reasons, mainly because he was asked by Kaufman, the general governor at the time, to do more research on the region because it has just been sort of conquested by the Russian Empire. And so scientists played a big role in understanding the region and so forth and its people. Out of curiosity, he wanted to follow up on a report he had read about a glacier in Central Asia that was called the Zirafshan Glacier, which is in nowadays Tajikistan. It was a bit curious to him because the report was saying that this glacier was advancing. And he thought this was very strange because all glaciers in Europe were actually retreating already by the time, by the end of the 19th century. And so he couldn't quite believe that. So he started an expedition and found out actually that glaciers were also retreating, just as they were in Europe. So this is the first sort of a figure. I mean, there's another much more famous person, and his name is Alexey Fitchenko. After him is named the biggest glacier in Central Asia, which is the Fitchenko Glacier. Today it's called Van Check, actually, because a few years ago the Tajik government decided to rename all Russian toponymes, or not all, something like 5,000 toponymes, and give them Tajik names. So he was one of the first also who looked at glaciers. And then another figure that's much more interesting to me is actually Nikolai Kajnevsky. He was born also in European Russia, but he moved and lived in Central Asia all his life. I think he moved there because of his parents quite early in a young age. Then he was a general, he worked in the army, and when he had holidays, he would spend his money on renting a horse and he would go into the Palmya Mountains too to look at glaciers. He was very interested in glaciers. So he studied them, he looked at them, he observed them, he realized differences. And he's interesting because he was a scientist that lived throughout the Russian imperial period and also throughout the Soviet Union. So he died in 1957 and he started doing his research in the early 20th century. So it's really an interesting figure from a point of view of a history of science of how he managed to live throughout the imperial period and then still remained a very famous scientist in the Soviet period. And another person, for example, is Ikram Nazarov. He's not really a glaciologist, but he's interesting because he is actually, for what I've studied, because I mainly focus on Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in my research. For Kazakhstan, the situation is a bit different. But for the Uzbek part and the Tajik part, he's actually the only ethnic Central Asian that was participating in glaciology, glacial research. Otherwise, it was mainly men of Slavic origin. So yeah, he's an Uzbek. He didn't speak any Russian. He grew up in Tashkent on the street because next to him was a sort of Dom specialist. So those were like engineers that would be sent from the European part of Russia to the so-called Soviet peripheries to bring in their engineering expertise. And so with these kids, he played on the street and he would learn Russian from them. And then he started to be interested, he wanted to do a sport something. So when he was 17, he joined the Palace of Sports in Tashkent. And there he accidentally ended up in the Alpinist Club, which was also filled with Russians only. Yeah, so he started mountaineering, etc., etc. And then after a while he became very, very good in mountaineering. He got all these, you know, medals and orders and all these things that they get when they when in this Russian hierarchy of sport. Yeah, and then he accompanied glaciologists as a technician to these expeditions. He overwintered for one year. He was a military alpinist and so forth. So and what's interesting about him actually, throughout all this assistant work he did with these glaciologists, he wanted to become a glaciologist himself. So he wanted to do a PhD. He did a degree in geography later in his life, then he wanted to do a PhD. But no one actually wanted him to be a PhD, to be a scientist. They wanted to keep him as he said it himself. I did an interview with him as a Ishak, so as a donkey that is the one that helps sort of the Russians to carry the luggage up the glacier and so forth. And of course, yeah, there are a few others, but I mean those are the figures that really stick out. Maybe there's another person, his name is Viktor Schulz, now I remember, and he's interesting because he did the calculation of how much water is actually in glaciers that actually ends up in rivers that then will be used for irrigation and hydropower and so forth. And he's interesting because he started a debate with people in Moscow who argued that, well, we should actually bomb and make explode these glaciers because there's so much water in them. And so he started doing this calculation. And so there's this very interesting tension between the Central Asian glaciologists and the ones in Moscow. So there's a lot of tension. So these figures sort of play a big role in telling that story.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Wow, those are really amazing stories, also, like with various approaches and how scientists were reacting to some like political ideas, right? What should we do with the region and like with the water supplies?

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

What would you say was the main motivation for glacier research? Was it like the amount of water that the region is getting? Was it the size of glaciers? Like, what were researchers interested in in particular?

SPEAKER_02 9:40

Actually, that's not one clear answer one can give. I think this is really also like sort of one has to look at the developments. On the beginning, glaciers were interesting mainly for geologists, yeah. So someone like Ivan Mushkietov in the 19th century, because for them were these objects that would form a landscape. Yeah, so they would be interested in what geologists call the geomorphology of a glacier. So this was interesting to them. To them, the water issue was not a topic at all, yeah, which is why this whole story is so interesting of how it moved from just being a geomorphological object to really something that would, in the end, be an indicator of climate change. And this is exactly the story I would like to tell. So this was Ivan Mushkiatov in the 19th century, and then I think for someone like Nikolai Kaziniewski, um, glaciers were very interesting phenomena, also just as object because he thought they were fascinating, they were very powerful. There was also this challenge, you know, of like conquering them, discovering them, mapping them, writing down how many they are. That was one of his big projects to write the first atlas of glaciers in Central Asia. So he counted them, and by 1930s he had something like 1500 something. So that was also one of those things that were measurable, you could count them and so forth. So basically, I would argue that after beginning with the Soviet power, glaciers really started to play a very important role, as you said yourself, for water availabilities, for irrigation, for irrigation of cotton plantations, but also later then for hydroelectricity. And this was then basically the only scientific interest. You can see that in the archival documents, how this really switched very quickly and immediately to water as a resource, to water as a commodity to use for agriculture and economy and so forth.

SPEAKER_01 11:23

Can you maybe speak more specifically about the Soviet period? What kind of stories are you following on there? And I mean, you already mentioned a couple of stories, also with, like, for example, Uzbek. Glacier scientists are not supporting the plans of the federal government to explode the glaciers, but maybe there are a few other interesting stories we can highlight here.

SPEAKER_02 11:41

Well, I think I already mentioned the two most important ones. I guess that's why I mentioned them. So this is just so obvious. I mean, one is how quickly glaciers became this commodity, the other one, yeah, these artificial glacier melting projects. Another story I'm following up on, it's in the framework of a different project I actually run at the University of Fribourg, and it's on gender and glaciology, or gender and field science more general, but my part is dealing with gender and glaciology. So, what role played masculinity for glaciologists during the Soviet Union? But also, as you may have noticed, I mentioned only male scientists in the second question you asked. But of course, there were also women. I mean, not in the early period, but later during the Soviet period, there were, of course, women and they had very distinctive roles. I interviewed some of them, and so this is an angle I find very interesting, especially for the Soviet time. And then, of course, yeah, I mean, what I mentioned, the story about Ikram Nazarov, I mean, that is to me a story that's particularly of interest because I think it because apart from telling a story about glaciers, I'm also trying to tell a story about science in Central Asia. Yeah, so how was science done in Central Asia? What was the role between the Soviet republics and Central Russia, mainly Moscow? So, what role did scientists actually play in terms of, you know, providing data? Was it just a data resource provider, or was there actually some intellectual exchange? And what role then did ethnic Central Asians play in their in their relationship with Slavic scientists? And so you're sort of questioning ideas we had of Soviet science before and using the Central Asian example for that.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

But was there any interest in international cooperations between scientists, say from Russia or later from the Soviet Union, with their fellow researchers from other European countries or some other parts of the world?

SPEAKER_02 13:33

Definitely between glaciologists in Moscow, yeah, that is for sure, because already, I mean, just with all the work they did on the Arctic and mainly Antarctica, because I mean Antarctic was basically the research hub where international uh scientists would meet all the time. With mountain glaciers, there was not necessarily a collaboration, but I mean that's also part of the story I'm telling. So you have these so-called international polar years. There was one in 1888, there was another one in in 1932, and then the third one, they called it the International Geophysical Year, that was in 1957. And apart from the very first one, which was still in the 19th century, the other two, the Soviet Union put a very strong focus on glaciers and especially mountain glacier research. Yeah, so these polar years, they were, of course, much more interested in the Arctic, and then in 1957, they were much more interested in Antarctica. But the Soviet Union really pushed for also looking at glaciers in mountain regions, especially in their case Central Asia and the Caucasus, because they thought that glaciers in high altitudes play an important role for understanding atmospheric dynamics. But also, of course, for them it was important to understand the entire hydrology. And this also included glaciers and higher altitudes. In that sense, they didn't really collaborate as what we understand now, yeah, that people meet and so forth, but they were still involved in some really large scale. I mean, some people called this 1957 International Geophysical Year the scientific Olympics of some sort. I mean, we are talking about what, 30,000 scientists from all over the world that participated in this event. And then you had one particular collaboration with people from the GDR and glaciologists from Central Asia. And this was exactly during this International Geophysical Year. So they would together look at two glaciers in Central Asia. One was the Fichenko Glacier or the Van Shak, which is in nowadays Tajikistan, and the other one is the Tuyuksu, which is in Kazakhstan. So there they did collaborative work. But the collaboration is always, we cannot really compare this to today because the collaboration was still very much each on their own. So they went together there, but then there was not really data exchange. For climate change, this is a different story. There was a big, big collaboration that actually lasted from 1972 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But that's a completely different story because this was between Leningrad and the United States mainly. So this was not Central Asia.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

Why would you say that kind of research is relevant and important now? When you speak publicly about it or when you talk to your colleagues who are doing other research, like why do you think it's important to know what the scientists were doing in their glacier research in Central Asia in the 19th century or the 20th century?

SPEAKER_02 16:11

One of my main ideas is to tell the story of glaciers before they became icons of climate change. I think this is just as important as I find the history of climate science or the history of climate change in that sense. Because I think it's important for us to understand sort of what went wrong. I mean, why are we in the situation we are in now, that we have all this knowledge and still there's no political action or almost none from the main polluters in this world and from the main government and states that have caused this problem. And I think for this, it's to understand how people have dealt with change, with environmental change, and be that glacier retreat or environmental change in other senses. I think it's important that people understand that, for example, already 200 years ago or 300 years ago, people were already noting down, writing, discussing, and debating climatic changes. Yeah, I mean, there were not anthropogenic climate changes, but still, I mean that these are problems people have dealt with in the past. And I think this is important to understand today's problems and to find better solutions, I guess. Also, I need to say that for historians, often our idea is not that we find solutions, we just want to sort of tell the stories. So our task is not to find the solution. But I still think that, especially for a region like Central Asia, where we know very, very little about, and I think here it's just important to tell the story of these water towers, yeah, as they're called, these glaciers, because for now there's an abundance of water in Central Asia because glaciers are melting at a faster speed than ever, so there's a lot of water. But soon this will be over, and then this region is going to have a very big problem with water availability. And of course, my story is not going to change that. That is true, and that is for sure. But I still think that knowing how people have researched and that they have researched it is very important.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

I also have a very strange question too, but I somehow thought of it. Go on. You've been in the region a lot yourself, right? And you also saw a lot of glaciers yourself. Yes. I think you know, all these ideas of like hyper objects, you know, Timothy Morton, and there are some hyper objects out on the planet which are very easy to see and to understand and to grasp for us as humans. Would you say you have some kind of personal relationships with such large objects as glaciers? And if yes, then what kind are they? Like what do you think of them? What do you feel towards them when you're there?

SPEAKER_02 18:35

Well, actually, I have to admit, so I answered too quickly. I have been to the region very, very often. I also lived in Tashkent for three years of my life, so but I have not seen a Central Asian glacier. I've seen Tuyoksu and MIT, but I mean the other ones, the big ones, I have not seen because they're simply in very remote regions, yeah, which is also one of the reasons why they don't really play such a strong role in public debates because they're so remote, yeah, remote of the big cities. Yeah, it's a funny question. I don't think anyone has ever asked me about a personal relationship to big objects like that. Well, I think with the project, I started to have this relationship because you know you look at a lot of images, these uh repeat photographies of glaciers of what they looked like before, what they look like now. There are these glaciers in Latin America that have basically already ceased to exist. So they're not glaciers anymore because all the ice is gone, and they're these frightening images. So, yes, I mean it's a relationship built up. But I think I also, because for me, this whole entire topic of climate change is, I think, like for everyone very frightening. And so I think over time I had to sort of also build up myself sort of a protective wall, you know, because if you start working on something like you can't every day just be upset and shocked by what this is going to mean for societies, for societies in Central Asia, for us and Europe. And so I think I also tried to detach myself from it. It's a little bit both. I mean, on one hand, I have this relationship, for example, I have this huge image of this black and white picture that was taken of this Fitchenko glacier in 1928 doing this famous Soviet-German expedition that was taken by Finster Walde, a German geodesist. And it's beautiful. I mean, they're beautiful, they're just beautiful and stunning and amazing. And I learned so much about them. First, I just thought it's just a bit of ice. And the question you asked me is a question I usually ask the scientists I speak to. Yeah, so for example, I did an interview with a French glaciologist who also worked on the Fitchenko Glacier because we are writing this echo-biography about the Fitchenko glacier from the 19th century to now. And so I did an interview with her because I wanted to exactly understand from her relationship with these glaciers. And it was very interesting because she was describing how even when she's not in Central Asia working on these glaciers at home in Grenoble, she would still look at satellite images that are updated every five days, and she would look, oh, so how is my Fichchenko doing? And I just thought it's a very nice and cute sort of anecdote about researchers' life. I think my personal relationship with glaciers is based on images because I mean I have seen very few glaciers. If I'm in Central Asia, I usually work in the archives, and I've seen a few glaciers here in Europe. I myself I live close to the Alps. And yeah, no, I understand this fascinations with these hyper objects. I think because I'm a historian, so I'm very much more interested in the relationship of humans with these hyperobjects. So I'm not actually thinking so much about my own relationship to that. So I'm more thinking and how do they look at them, how does that change for them? For me, they remain big icons of climate change. Now, with the research I did, I think I also look at them in a different way because I don't only think of them as icons of climate change or of environmental change, because I think then of this entire history of what they have been looked at before. There's also this very interesting article by Mark Carey, which tells exactly that story of what glaciers were before. They used to be scary, no one wanted. To go there because they were frightening. I mean, there's a lot of stories of indigenous people who have these very interesting relationships to glaciers. I myself, I haven't really formed this very personal relationship because I think I'm more living of other people's relationship with them. I don't know, I'm not sure that makes sense. But certainly when I look at images of them, I just find them fascinating. I mean, they are so huge and they're so alive in a sense. Yeah. I mean, they live. I mean, they're living beings in that sense. And not only because they change and they retreat in and advance, but also because of what goes on with the eyes inside of them, the bacterias and all that. So, and the colors they change and all that. Yeah, I just think they're very fascinating and beautiful. Definitely beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Is there any particular aspect of your research and something that you've learned in the last years that I haven't asked you about, but what you'd think would be interesting for our listeners?

SPEAKER_02 22:56

That is certainly something I look at constantly, is the relationship of scientist to glaciers, but also how they look at climate change. And this question for me has been driving my research on the history of climate science in the Soviet Union, but also now on glacial research. And I think this is a question that I find very interesting. So I know a lot about climate science, and Michail Buddhiko, him and his colleagues started to look at climate change and anthropogenic climate change, how they were part of the group that discovered it and so forth. So this was driving my research about glaciers. I was wondering, so okay, so you have these, you know, what we call to the icons of climate change. But what did these glaciologists at the time, so let's say in 1957, when we had this International Geophysical Year, which I mentioned, there was basically consensus among glaciologists at the time, and be that glaciologists working on the Arctic and Antarctica or mountainous glaciers, all of them realize that the glaciers have been retreating. And so what happened in the Soviet Union? What did all these scientists in Central Asia do with this observation, with this sort of consensus on the retreat of them? Yeah, and I find it interesting how their responses, they're very similar to the responses of the climatologists, yeah, and Leningra, like Michael Budiko, how basically in the 1970s they were agreeing, yes, glaciers are retreating, but it's part of a cyclical process. Yeah, so they're much more than Michael Budiko. Michaeliko did not think that. He was not one of the defenders of the psychical natural process definition or theory. They did not see it as a crisis, yeah. So there was no alarmism, it was just okay, so they're melting, but there will be colder periods again and the ice will just come back. They were much more looking at this water issue as water supply and economic planning and debating whether we should manipulate them or not. So even while they realized that glaciers were already retreating for reasons that were sort of outside of the hand of the individual, they were still thinking of manipulating them, of bombing them, of getting their water. And so I think this relationship to this environmental changes, particularly of some of the scientists, yeah, not of all, but of the majority of them, I think is very interesting for my research.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Thank you so much, Katia, for being with us today. I truly learned a lot from you, and I think our listeners also do. All the best with your research, and I hope we'll come back to you in a couple of years and we'll speak again and you share everything else that you learn. In the meantime, our listeners can read your publications, can read your books, because I think you also published a number of books. We'll make sure I will post all the links in the comments to this episode.

SPEAKER_02 25:27

Okay. Great, thank you. It was a big pleasure for me. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

So, this was Katja Dose, an environmental historian who just told us some really interesting and fascinating things about the history of glaciology in Central Asia. I heard so many interesting things there that I really, really hope to be able to see some of these glaciers one day. It sounds very, very fascinating. And I mean some aspects of the stories also sound almost outlandish today. So, some of the Soviet, what you would call today, geoengineering plans, like blowing up glaciers and trying to influence basically how they work. It sounds crazy today, so I think this conversation could have gone on for even much longer. I hope you enjoyed it. Yeah, Angelina.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Well, thank you, Boris. I found it fascinating. Like I opened up a book. Right. We strongly recommend also Katis publications and Katis books, and as always, we'll post all the links to her publications in the description of this episode. Whatever she mentioned, all the sources, you all find it. I hope that our dear listeners, you enjoyed the episode. You're listening to the Eurasian Climate Brief podcast, which is trying to look into what's happening in the region of Central Asia, in the area of climate, environmental sustainability, climate research, climate activism. This episode was supported by N Ost, which is a media NGO and European journalistic network committed to cross-border and multi-prospective reporting. If you enjoyed listening to our episode, please follow, please rate, and please share our work. Keep listening to the podcast, do recommend it to your friends and colleagues and family. And reach out to us, reach out with your ideas, with your feedback, with your stories. We'll be back soon. In the meantime, to stay in touch and thank you for being with us.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

Thank you for listening. Goodbye.