Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T04:18:21.372Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

21 - Cold War Environmental Knowledge in the Polar Regions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2023

Adrian Howkins
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Peder Roberts
Affiliation:
University of Stavanger
Get access

Summary

In the twenty-first century, scientists and the media track the health of the planet in the polar regions. Shrinking sea ice in the Arctic and Southern oceans, melting ice shelves in Nunavut, Greenland, and West Antarctica, and thawing permafrost in Alaska and Siberia are signals of global warming. This has led people to refer to these regions as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ or the ‘ground zero’ and ‘epicentre’ of climate change.1 Such metaphors impart an abstract quality to the polar regions, with rising temperatures and loss of ice serving merely as numbers on the dashboard of Spaceship Earth. This view of the polar regions as integral yet neutral – transparent indicators of a global system – has an intellectual and political history. Created by the scientific context of the Cold War, it provides a powerful, panoptic perspective of the planet while obscuring the heterogeneity and pluralism of beings and places.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrahamian, Atossa Araxia, “The New Cold War”, New Statesman (30 September 2019).Google Scholar
Adamsky, Viktor, and Smirnov, Yuri, “Moscow’s Biggest Bomb: The 50-Megaton Test of October 1961”, Cold War International History Project Bulletin 4 (Fall 1994): 1921.Google Scholar
Alley, Richard B., The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Almond, Kyle, “What It’s Like at the Ground Zero of Climate Change”, CNN.com (September 2018), www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/09/world/greenland-climate-change-cnnphotos/.Google Scholar
Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, Impacts of a Warming Arctic: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Arzyutov, Dmitry, “Environmental Encounters: Woolly Mammoth, Indigenous Communities and Metropolitan Scientists in the Soviet Arctic”, Polar Record 55 (May 2019): 142153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barenberg, Alan, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baskakov, G. A., Voskresenskii, A. I, Gerasimova, T. M, et al., “Arkticheskii i antarkticheskii nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut – tsentr Rossiiskoi poliarnoi nauki”, in Problemy Arktiki i Antarktiki, iubileinyi vypusk 70 (k 75-lettiu AANII) (St Petersburg: Gidrometeoizdat, 1995), pp. 632.Google Scholar
Benson, Etienne, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Berger, André, “A Brief History of the Astronomical Theories of Paleoclimates”, in Berger, André, Mesinger, Fedor, and Sijacki, Djordje, eds., Climate Change: Inferences from Paleoclimate and Regional Aspects (Vienna: Springer 2012), pp. 107129.Google Scholar
Bergstrom, Dana M., Klekociuk, Andrew, King, Diana, and Robinson, Sharon, “Antarctica: What It Means When the Coldest Place on Earth Records an Unprecedented Heatwave”, The Guardian (31 March 2020), www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/antarctica-what-it-means-when-the-coldest-place-on-earth-records-an-unprecedented-heatwave.Google Scholar
Bocking, Stephen, “A Disciplined Geography: Aviation, Science, and the Cold War in Northern Canada, 1945–1960”, Technology and Culture 50 (2009): 265290.Google Scholar
Bocking, Stephen, “Toxic Surprises: Contaminants and Knowledge in the Northern Environment”, in Bocking, Stephen and Martin, Brad, eds., Ice Blink: Navigating Northern Environmental History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2017), pp. 421464.Google Scholar
Bradley, D. J., Radioactive Contamination of the Arctic Region, Baltic Sea, and the Sea of Japan from Activities in the Former Soviet Union (Richland, WA: Pacific Northwest Laboratory, 1992).Google Scholar
Brooks, C. E. P., Climate through the Ages: A Study of the Climatic Factors and Their Variations (New York: R. V. Coleman, 1926).Google Scholar
Budyko, M. I., Climate and Life, ed. Miller, David H. (New York: Academic, 1974).Google Scholar
Budyko, M. I., “The Future Climate”, Eos 53 (October 1972): 868874.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Emilie, “Climate Anti-politics: Scale, Locality, and Arctic Climate Change”, in Bocking, Stephen and Martin, Brad, eds., Ice Blink: Navigating Northern Environmental History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2017), pp. 465495.Google Scholar
Cameron, Emilie, “Securing Indigenous Politics: A Critique of the Vulnerability and Adaptation Approach to the Human Dimensions of Climate Change in the Canadian Arctic”, Global Environmental Change 22 (2012): 103114.Google Scholar
“A Canary in the Coal Mine”, The Economist (13 November 2004): 105106.Google Scholar
Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).Google Scholar
Chu, Pey-Yi, The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cittadino, Eugene, “Barry Commoner and Paul Sears on Project Chariot: Epiphany, Ecology, and the Atomic Energy Commission”, Isis 109 (2018): 720743.Google Scholar
Creager, Angela N. H., Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dalmedico, Amy Dahan, “History and Epistemology of Models: Meteorology (1946–1963) as a Case Study”, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 55 (April 2001): 395422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, Bathsheba, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019).Google Scholar
Dodds, Klaus, “Assault on the Unknown: Geopolitics, Antarctic Science and the International Geophysical Year (1957–8)”, in Naylor, Simon and Ryan, James R., eds., New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 148172.Google Scholar
Dodds, Klaus, Gan, Irina, and Howkins, Adrian, “The IPY-3: The International Geophysical Year (1957–1958)”, in Barr, Susan and Lüdecke, Cornelia, eds., The History of the International Polar Years (IPYs) (Berlin: Springer, 2010), pp. 239257.Google Scholar
Doel, Ronald E., “Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military’s Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945”, Social Studies of Science 33 (2003): 635666.Google Scholar
Doel, Ronald E., “What’s the Place of the Physical Environmental Sciences in Environmental History?”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 56 (2009): 137164.Google Scholar
Doel, Ronald E., Harper, Kristine C, and Heymann, Matthias, eds., Exploring Greenland: Cold War Science and Technology on Ice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).Google Scholar
Doel, Ronald E., Harper, Kristine C., and Heymann, Matthias, “Introduction: Exploring Greenland’s Secrets: Science, Technology, Diplomacy, and Cold War Planning in Global Contexts”, in Doel, Ronald E., Harper, Kristine C., and Heymann, Matthias, eds., Exploring Greenland: Cold War Science and Technology on Ice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 122.Google Scholar
Doel, Ronald E., Friedman, Robert Marc, Lajus, Julia, Sörlin, Sverker, and Wråkberg, Urban, “Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge. Interwar Era through the Cold War”, Journal of Historical Geography 44 (April 2014): 6080.Google Scholar
Dörries, Matthias, “The Politics of Atmospheric Sciences: ‘Nuclear Winter’ and Global Climate Change”, Osiris 26 (2011): 198223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunham, Vera, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Edwards, Paul N., “Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism”, Osiris 21 (2006): 229250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Paul N., A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Farish, Matthew, “Creating Cold War Climates”, in O’Neill, John R. and Unger, Corinna R., eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 5184.Google Scholar
Farish, Matthew, “The Lab and the Land: Overcoming the Arctic in Cold War Alaska”, Isis 104 (2013): 129.Google Scholar
Farish, Matthew, and Whitney Lackenbauer, P., “Western Electric Turns North: Technicians and the Transformation of the Cold War Arctic”, in Bocking, Stephen and Martin, Brad, eds., Ice Blink: Navigating Northern Environmental History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2017), pp. 261292.Google Scholar
Fleming, James Rodger, “James Croll in Context: The Encounter Between Climate Dynamics and Geology in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century”, in Berger, André, Ercegovac, Marko, and Mesinger, Fedor, eds., Paleoclimate and the Earth Climate System (Belgrade: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2005), pp. 1320.Google Scholar
Galison, Peter, “The Many Faces of Big Science”, in Galison, Peter and Hevly, Bruce, eds., Big Science: The Growth of Large-scale Research (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 117.Google Scholar
Gerovitch, Slava, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Gieryn, Thomas F., “Three Truth-Spots”, Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences 38 (2002): 113132.Google Scholar
Greene, Mott T., “Arctic Sea Ice, Oceanography, and Climate Models”, in Benson, Keith R. and Rozwadowski, Helen M., eds., Extremes: Oceanography’s Adventures at the Poles (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2007), pp. 303329.Google Scholar
Grevsmühl, Sebastian Vincent, “Laboratory Metaphors in Antarctic History: From Nature to Space”, in Herzberg, Julia, Kehrt, Christian, and Torma, Franziska, eds., Ice and Snow in the Cold War: Histories of Extreme Climatic Environments (New York: Berghahn, 2019), pp. 211–235.Google Scholar
Gustafson, Thane, Crisis Amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy Under Brezhnev and Gorbachev (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Hamblin, Jacob D., Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Harper, Kristine, Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).Google Scholar
Heymann, Matthias, and Achermann, Dania, “From Climatology to Climate Science in the Twentieth Century”, in White, Sam, Pfister, Christian, and Mauelshagen, Franz, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 605632.Google Scholar
Heymann, Matthias, and Martin-Nielsen, Janet, “Introduction: Perspectives on Cold War Science in Small European States”, Centaurus 55 (2013): 221242.Google Scholar
Howkins, Adrian, “Melting Empires? Climate Change and Politics in Antarctica Since the International Geophysical Year”, Osiris 26 (2011): 180197.Google Scholar
Iarocci, Andrew, “Opening the North: Technology and Training at the Fort Churchill Joint Services Experimental Testing Station, 1946–64”, Canadian Army Journal 10 (2008): 7495.Google Scholar
Josephson, Paul, The Conquest of the Russian Arctic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Josephson, Paul, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Kalnins, Ints, “Arctic Expedition to Investigate ‘Epicenter of Climate Change’”, Reuters (21 September 2019), www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-expedition-idUSKBN1W51CZ.Google Scholar
Kamenskii, R. M., ed., Akademicheskoe merzlotovedenie v Iakutii (Iakutsk: Institut merzlotovedeniia SO RAN, 1997).Google Scholar
Khalturin, Vitaly I., Rautian, Tatyana G, Richards, Paul G, and Leith, William S, “A Review of Nuclear Testing by the Soviet Union at Novaya Zemlya, 1955–1990”, Science and Global Security 13 (2005): 142.Google Scholar
Kirsch, Scott, “Peaceful Nuclear Explosions and the Geography of Scientific Authority”, Professional Geographer 52 (2000): 179192.Google Scholar
Knudsen, Henrik, “Rockets over Thule? American Hegemony, Ionosphere Research and the Politics of Rockets in the Wake of the 1968 Thule B-52 Accident”, in Bocking, Stephen and Heidt, D., eds., Cold Science: Environmental Knowledge in the North American Arctic During the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 217235.Google Scholar
Krementsov, Nikolai, Stalinist Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Krige, John, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).Google Scholar
Krüger, Tobias, Discovering the Ice Ages: International Reception and Consequences for a Historical Understanding of Climate, trans. Ann M. Hentschel (Leiden: Brill, 2013).Google Scholar
Krupnik, Igor, and Chlenov, Michael, Yupik Transitions: Change and Survival at Bering Strait, 1900–1960 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Leslie, Stuart A., The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Lovelock, James E., and Margulis, Lynn, “Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis”, Tellus 26 (1974): 210.Google Scholar
Lukin, Karina, “Leaving Novaȋa Zemlȋa: Narrative Strategies of the Resettlement of the Nenets”, Arctic Anthropology 54 (January 2017): 3245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manabe, Syukuro, and Wetherald, Richard T., “Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity”, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 24 (1967): 241259.Google Scholar
Martin-Nielsen, Janet, “‘An Orgy of Hypothesizing’: The Construction of Glaciological Knowledge in Cold War America”, in Herzberg, Julia, Kehrt, Christian, and Torma, Franziska, eds., Ice and Snow in the Cold War: Histories of Extreme Climatic Environments (New York: Berghahn, 2019), pp. 6988.Google Scholar
Mauelshagen, Franz, “Climate as a Scientific Paradigm: Early History of Climatology to 1800”, in White, Sam, Pfister, Christian, and Mauelshagen, Franz, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 565588.Google Scholar
McCannon, John, A History of the Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation (London: Reaktion, 2012).Google Scholar
Murozumi, M., Chow, Tsaihwa J., and Patterson, C., “Chemical Concentrations of Pollutant Lead Aerosals, Terrestrial Dusts, and Sea Salts in Greenland and Antarctic Snow Strata”, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 33 (1969): 12471294.Google Scholar
Needell, Allan A., “Lloyd Berkner and the International Geophysical Year Proposal in Context: With Some Comments on the Implications for the Comité Spéciale de l’Année Géophysique Internationale, CASAGI, Request for Launching Earth Orbiting Satellites”, in Launius, Roger D., Fleming, James Rodger, and DeVorkin, David H., eds., Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 205224.Google Scholar
Ohmura, Atsumu, “A Historical Review of Studies on the Energy Balance of Arctic Tundra”, Journal of Climatology 2 (1982): 185195.Google Scholar
Oldfield, Jonathan, “Mikhail Budyko’s (1920–2001) Contributions to Global Climate Science: From Heat Balance to Climate Change and Global Ecology”, WIREs Climate Change 7 (October 2016): 682692.Google Scholar
Oliva, Mara, “Arctic Cold War: Climate Change Has Ignited a New Polar Power Struggle”, The Conversation (28 November 2018), http://theconversation.com/arctic-cold-war-climate-change-has-ignited-a-new-polar-power-struggle-107329.Google Scholar
O’Neill, Dan, The Firecracker Boys (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1994).Google Scholar
O’Neill, John R., and Unger, Corinna R, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Pike, Francis, “Cold War: Russia’s Bid to Control the Arctic”, The Spectator (12 December 2020).Google Scholar
Plokhy, Serhii, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (New York: Basic, 2014).Google Scholar
Powell, Richard C., Studying Arctic Fields: Cultures, Practices, and Environmental Sciences (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).Google Scholar
Pryde, Philip R., “Radioactive Contamination”, in Maria Shahgedanova, ed., The Physical Geography of Northern Eurasia. Oxford Regional Environments Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 448462.Google Scholar
Reed, John C., and Ronhovde, A. G., Arctic Laboratory: A History (1946–1966) of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory at Point Barrow, Alaska (Washington, DC: Arctic Institute of North America, 1971).Google Scholar
Reid, Susan, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev”, Slavic Review 61 (Summer 2002): 211252.Google Scholar
Reiss, Bob, “Barrow, Alaska: Ground Zero for Climate Change”, Smithsonian Magazine, (March 2010), www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/barrow-alaska-ground-zero-for-climate-change-7553696/.Google Scholar
Rindzevičiūtė, Eglė, The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened up the Cold War World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Sanchez-Sibony, Oscar, Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Schwerdtfeger, W., “The Climate of the Antarctic”, in S. Orvig, ed., Climates of the Polar Regions. World Survey of Climatology, Vol. 14 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1970), pp. 253330.Google Scholar
Selcer, Perrin, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Serreze, Mark C., Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Shea, Neil, “The New Cold War”, National Geographic (September 2019): 5073.Google Scholar
Sörlin, Sverker, “Narratives and Counter-narratives of Climate Change: North Atlantic Glaciology and Meteorology, c.1930–1955”, Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009): 237255.Google Scholar
Stirling, Ian, Lunn, Nicholas J., and Iacozza, John, “Long-term Trends in the Population Ecology of Polar Bears in Western Hudson Bay in Relation to Climatic Change”, Arctic 52 (1999): 294306.Google Scholar
Stuhl, Andrew, “The Politics of the ‘New North’: Putting History and Geography at Stake in Arctic Futures”, Polar Journal 3 (June 2013): 94119.Google Scholar
Thomas, Campbell, “Woman Scientist the Navy Refused to Take on Board”, The Guardian (12 January 2000), www.theguardian.com/news/2000/jan/12/guardianobituaries1.Google Scholar
Thompson, Niobe, Settlers on the Edge: Identity and Modernization on Russia’s Arctic Frontier (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).Google Scholar
United States Congress Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear Wastes in the Arctic: An Analysis of Arctic and Other Regional Impacts from Soviet Nuclear Contamination (Washington, DC: Office of Technology Assessment, Congress of the United States, 1995).Google Scholar
van der Watt, Lize-Marié, Roberts, Peder, and Lajus, Julia, “Institutions and the Changing Nature of Arctic Research During the Early Cold War”, in Bocking, S and Heidt, D, eds., Cold Science: Environmental Knowledge in the North American Arctic During the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 197216.Google Scholar
van Wyck, Peter C., The Highway of the Atom (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Vowinckel, E., and Orvig, S., “The Climate of the North Polar Basin”, in S. Orvig, ed., Climates of the Polar Regions. World Survey of Climatology, Vol. 14 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1970), pp. 129252.Google Scholar
Vucinich, Alexander, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1917–1970) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar
Warde, Paul, Robin, Libby, and Sverker, Sörlin, The Environment: A History of the Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Weart, Spencer, “The Development of General Circulation Models of Climate”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 41 (2010): 208217.Google Scholar
Westad, Odd Arne, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic, 2017).Google Scholar
Whyte, Kyle, “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene”, English Language Notes 55 (Spring/Fall 2017): 153162.Google Scholar
Wiseman, Matthew, “Unlocking the ‘Eskimo Secret’: Defence Science in the Cold War Canadian Arctic, 1947–1954”, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 26 (2015): 191223.Google Scholar
Zubok, Vladislav, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×