Rochester historians are chronicling the history of the world鈥檚 glacial regions鈥攁nd human responses to their rapid disappearance.
While some thrive on the energy, sounds, and smells of large metropolitan areas, and decidedly do not. Equally, lush tropical beaches hold little sway for them. Instead, cold, sparse landscapes are their ticket.
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.
The personal and professional lives of Weaver, a professor of history, and Bakhmetyeva, a professor of instruction in the 听and the associate director of the University鈥檚 , 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.
鈥淧eople ask us all the time how we can live, work, and then travel together,鈥� Bakhmetyeva says with a laugh. 鈥淔or us it鈥檚 great.鈥�
Until the disruption caused by COVID-19, the couple had spent the summers of 2018 and 2019 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 听to work on the 鈥溾�� project, an effort to preserve the rich culture and history of the locale and its people in oral history form鈥攂efore it鈥檚 too late.
In his Carnegie application, Weaver describes the harrowing backdrop to their research鈥攖orrential rains that wrecked the region on August 5, 2010: 鈥淎 violent cloudburst dumped fourteen inches of rain on Ladakh, accustomed to getting just three inches of rain in a year.鈥�
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.
Yet while Ladakh 鈥渟uffers from too much water, it also suffers from too little,鈥� says Weaver. Declining snowfall and glacial recession have diminished the region鈥檚 water reserves and wreaked havoc on the local agriculture.
The couple鈥檚 oral history work in Ladakh didn鈥檛 go unnoticed. In 2021, together with , who had earned a PhD in history from the University a year earlier, won the听听from the听American Society for Environmental History.
From pastime to profession
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.
鈥淚鈥檝e been a hiker and mountain climber all my life,鈥� says Weaver鈥攆irst in the Himalayas with his family, later as an adult in the mountains of Wyoming, Colorado, California, and now Europe. He鈥檚 been a keen reader of mountain and mountaineering literature as long as he can remember.
LISTEN: Visit the team鈥檚 oral history archive
Weaver would later add to the genre himself, coauthoring with Maurice Isserman (Yale University Press, 2008). The book not only won the National Outdoor Book Award for History and Biography that year, it also marked a departure from Weaver鈥檚 previous research specialty of British history, which he taught at Rochester for many years.
鈥淚ncreasingly over time, I鈥檝e become more interested in environmental history, the history of exploration, and now most recently, the history of exploration and science,鈥� Weaver explains. 鈥淣ow, I鈥檇 say I鈥檓 a historian of mountains and alpinism.鈥�
Meanwhile, Bakhmetyeva鈥檚 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 was about a Russian 茅migr茅 and her famous 19th-century Parisian salon. Today, Bakhmetyeva jokes that her academic interests have moved from the indoors to the outdoors.
At Rochester, she鈥檚 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.
Part of that research was a project about hunting. Specifically, Bakhmetyeva, a vegetarian, was and its importance in Soviet diplomatic relationships under , 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听used these outings, she argues, to display their 鈥渕arksmanship and physical prowess鈥� to present themselves to their foreign counterparts as 鈥減otent leaders and desired allies.鈥�
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 (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听glacier completely, determine its course, and establish its astonishing length.听Her interest piqued, Bakhmetyeva kept reading. Soon she stumbled across a German climber-scientist, Richard Finsterwalder, whose name sounded somehow familiar.
She recalls, 鈥淚 tuned to Stewart and said, 鈥榃ait, isn鈥檛 this guy I鈥檓 reading about here in the scientific mountain expedition one of your guys, too?鈥欌��
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听Kashmir.
Finsterwalder would become the couple鈥檚 first point of professional convergence.
鈥淔rom that we started unraveling the story of glaciers and it snowballed from there,鈥� says Bakhmetyeva. As the couple charted more environmental history projects, one geological feature in particular caught their attention鈥攊ce.
鈥淥f 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鈥檚 glaciers,鈥� the duo told fellow historians in 2023 at the History of Science Society meeting in Chicago.
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鈥攊t simply reacts to external forces. But the two Rochester historians argue for another dimension: 鈥淕laciers shape not just our physical landscapes, but also our social and cultural ones,鈥� says Weaver, noting that the ways in which societies have understood and interpreted glaciers have changed throughout history.
A new area of inquiry鈥攖he 鈥榠ce humanities鈥�
While climate scientists are documenting the physical loss of the world鈥檚 glaciers and are racing to find ways to slow it, environmental historians like Bakhmetyeva and Weaver are collecting and preserving human history鈥攁nd the history of glacial science鈥攊n 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枚rlin, in their book (Manchester University Press, 2022).
It can be confusing, admits Bakhmetyeva, who says the couple has been asked numerous times 鈥渨hat exactly鈥� they鈥攁s historians鈥攈ave to do with glaciers, which seem to fall squarely into the purview of geologists and environmental scientists.
The new field, which belongs under the larger umbrella of the environmental humanities鈥攊tself a consolidation of several fields that happened about 25 years ago鈥攊s 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. 鈥淚ce humanities鈥� 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.
Part of Weaver鈥檚 and Bakhmetyeva鈥檚 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鈥檚 largest glaciers? What role do glaciers play in the cultural imagining of the Pamiri people?
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.
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.
The founding fathers of glacial cartography
For Weaver, researching the history of glacial science marks a return to research he originally undertook nearly 20 years ago for Fallen Giants. The name Finsterwalder keeps popping up again and again in the couple鈥檚 research.
Avid outdoorsmen, mountaineers, and master glacial mappers, the Bavarian mathematician Sebastian Finsterwalder (1862鈥�1951) and his son, Richard Finsterwalder (1899鈥�1963), brought more than just their apt surname to the profession (the German root word 鈥渇inster鈥� translates to 鈥渄ark鈥� or 鈥済loomy,鈥� while 鈥渨ald鈥� means 鈥渇orest鈥�). They also successfully applied improvements in early remote sensing technology to , including using stereo photogrammetry from which they created early 3D images for their glacial cartography.
The elder Finsterwalder was the first to draw a topographically accurate map of a glacier, the in Austria, in 1889.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 the moment when glaciers became scientific objects, and that glacier map became the basis for climate research, available for longitudinal studies,鈥� notes Bakhmetyeva. Indeed, glacial climate scientists today still refer to these 135-year-old Finsterwalder maps.
鈥淔or 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,鈥� says Weaver about the founding fathers of glacial cartography.
Meanwhile, Bakhmetyeva, drawing on her background in gender studies, traces connections between early glacial science, glacial cartography, and an 鈥渆xplicitly masculinist ethos of heroic adventure鈥� in the Finsterwalders鈥� work, which went beyond mere mapping.
鈥淭o earn authority as a glaciologist took becoming a mountaineer and putting one鈥檚 body on the line as a vicarious scientific instrument,鈥� 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.
About a hundred years later, the Rochester historians are now retracing many of the Finsterwalders鈥� physical expeditions and scientific contributions鈥攆rom the Alps, to the Himalayas, and Pamirs.
鈥淲e鈥檝e 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,鈥� says Weaver. Being on site, he notes, provides meaningful context to the diaries of Sebastian Finsterwalder鈥檚 Alpine excursions, maps, and diagrams. 鈥淚t adds a whole new level of intuitive understanding and actual physical comprehension of the landscapes he explored,鈥� Weaver says.
Tracing the history of the Fedchenko Glacier
The couple鈥檚 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.
The mountains are home to thousands of glaciers, and it鈥檚 difficult to overstate their importance as the region鈥檚 natural water towers. According to NASA, of people in Central Eurasia rely on melted mountain waters for agriculture, energy, and drinking water.
Even among the range鈥檚 myriad glaciers, one stands out: the 48 mile-long Fedchenko, the one that the Soviet-German team measured and surveyed in 1928, and the world鈥檚 longest non-polar glacier. (As part of Tajikistan鈥檚 ongoing de-Russification program, the glacier was renamed Vanch-Yakh in 2023, but most sources are still using the old, historical name.)
Armed with a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) , Weaver and Bakhmetyeva joined the , an international collaborative dedicated to developing an interdisciplinary understanding of the high-mountain region of Asia.
鈥淎t a time when glaciers are fast disappearing, we return by way of the Fedchenko to the moment of their appearance in both the scientific and cultural imagination,鈥� the duo wrote in their NEH application. The idea is to offer a cultural perspective on the role of glaciology in climate change studies鈥攕ubjects that have been 鈥渉itherto neglected by humanists and humanistic social scientists,鈥� they argue.
In 2023, at the official kickoff meeting for the PAMIR Project in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the couple worked alongside geographers, cartographers, glaciologists, biologists, and geophysicists. Yet, a visit to the actual glacier has so far remained elusive for them. The region is remote and hard to access鈥攐n foot it takes weeks to reach, and evacuations are nearly impossible, notes Bakhmetyeva.
Helicopters seem the obvious answer, but politics got in the way. The lack of Tajiki pilots able to fly them and the subsequent wrangling over Swiss pilots flying in Tajiki airspace meant the plan turned into a 鈥渂ureaucratic political storm鈥� that has been dragging on for two years now, according to Weaver.
What makes the glaciers in the wider Pamir region so interesting to scientists and humanists alike is the curious fact that they melt and recede much more slowly than other glacial regions in the world. In the 1990s, scientists discovered an idiosyncrasy鈥攖he so-called (named after the eponymous mountain range)鈥攚hereby glaciers in the adjoining mountain ranges of the Karakoram and the Pamir remain largely unchanged, or even show small ice gains, in contrast to the marked retreat of other glaciers around the world.
鈥淭here鈥檚 something relatively stable here that intrigues everyone,鈥� says Bakhmetyeva. 鈥淯nderstandably, there鈥檚 a lot of desire to understand it.鈥� The duo is hoping to finally set foot on the glacier some time next year.
The timing may prove auspicious: The United Nations has designated 2025 as the launch of a to preserve glaciers.听Dushanbe is at center, playing host to a large symposium on glacier protection.
Meanwhile, on the so-called roof of the world, 350 square miles of cold and unspoilt Fedchenko are beckoning, a call that Weaver and Bakhmetyeva find hard to resist.
