Dancing with the cryosphere : Science, security, and 'artic' climate change

The cryosphere – the frozen parts of the Earth system – has been the object of human exploration, strategic interests, and scientific curiosities for centuries. Today, climate scientists strive to understand how the cryosphere is changing, and what the implications are for the Arctic region and for global climatic changes.

This PhD dissertation investigates how cryosphere-focused climate science produces knowledge about the changing ‘Arctic’ climate, who participates in this scientific practice, how they do so, and what the implications are for the knowledge produced and for those involved. Through multi-sited fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, the dissertation ‘dances’ with climate scientists as they produce knowledge about the changing cryosphere. Key to this analytical strategy of ‘dancing’ with climate scientists, is Andrew Pickering’s (1993, 1995) argument that at the heart of scientific practice is a ‘dance of agency’ at specific points in time and space through which natural scientists seek to capture nature. By zooming in on cryospheric climate science at a point in time (2023-2025) where the Arctic region is experiencing continued climatic changes alongside major geopolitical shifts and increasing attention from security actors, this dissertation contributes three single-authored articles, each delving into a cryospheric dance of agency: First, with permafrost scientists in Fairbanks, Alaska, second, with Greenland ice sheet glaciologists, and third, with sea ice experts in Europe and Canada. Together, the three articles show that the scientists’ dance of agency with the cryosphere is a dance that includes powerful non-scientific actors at the heart of its scientific practice.

Security actors, their logics, their infrastructure, and their sovereign decisions are not simply supporting dancers in these scientists’ capture of ‘nature’, but a central part of its production of the human-nature binary. Knowledge of the changing cryosphere is essential to defense and intelligence actors operating in the Arctic region, but their infrastructure, resources and spatial reach is simultaneously critical to cryospheric climate science, and this has direct impacts on its knowledge production on the Arctic climate. The frame of the dissertation synthesizes the theoretical and conceptual contributions of the articles and offers a methodological contribution on how to dance as social scientists with natural scientists to explore and analyse their scientific practice. The frame also speaks to two broad research agendas in International Relations. The first is concerned with environmental security and security in the Anthropocene. In relation to this literature, I problematize the assumption that we can escape the human-nature binary and become more secure as a result.

This assumption leads to a lack of theoretical and empirical attention to the scientists at the center of the production of this binary. As a remedy, we should seek to understand how climate scientists produce knowledge on climatic changes, examine who participates in these scientific processes, and explore both the humans and the nature it submits. Towards this, the second agenda sits at the crossroads of Critical Security Studies and Science and Technology Studies and is concerned with the role of science and technology in the constitution and practice of international security politics. This literature provides a solid foundation for exploring the production of climate science but is in need of rebalancing to avoid a tech-fixation, isolated from scientific processes and the tempo-spatial contexts in which they take place.

The concluding discussion sums up the contributions of the thesis, reflects on its choices and shortcomings, and ends on a more speculative note by discussing security politics in the Anthropocene 5 cryosphere as increasingly characterized by a more humble approach to acting in and with the cryosphere. This more humble approach seeks to understand climatic changes as inescapable and as something to be ‘danced’ with more or less smoothly, also by security actors. A more ‘humble security’ does not strive for resilient adaptation but involves a much more fundamental shift towards the acceptance of human asymmetry in front of the changing cryosphere.