Glaciers: art and history, science and uncertainty

Glaciers play a central role in the global environmental system, and their behaviour is intimately linked to changing patterns of the ocean-atmosphere circulation, climate, sea level and landscape. Deep cores retrieved from ice sheets have helped us recognise how climate has changed over hundreds of thousands of years, and, for many parts of the Earth's surface, an understanding of landforms, drainage patterns and surface geology would be impossible without an understanding of glacial processes. Today, the role of glaciers in the media and in the popular imagination is dominated by their role in science as indicators of environmental change. However, it is barely a hundred and fifty years since the significance of glaciers in this context was first appreciated. Before the middle of the nineteenth century glaciers occupied a different niche in popular perception, ruled by their place in the artistic and cultural domain rather than the scientific. Changing technologies for observing and analysing glacial phenomena have impacted on both scientific and cultural perceptions of glaciers, and our understanding is still constrained by technological limitations. Despite progress in remote sensing and analytical techniques, our reconstructions of past glaciations remain tentative, our understanding of modern glacial processes incomplete and our modelling of their future unreliable. In nineteenth century art, glaciers represented romance, mystery and unassailable majesty. In twenty-first century science their position is perhaps similar, but what art calls 'mystery', science calls 'uncertainty'.