Vital Ice: Controversies over Glacier Geoengineering in Chile

Abstract In light of contemporary geoengineering proposals to mitigate the impact of mining and climate change on glaciers in Chile, this article analyzes how imaginaries of glaciers have changed in recent decades. It focuses on recent proposals by consultancies and mining companies to relocate glaciers, including the transportation of over thirty thousand tons of ice to a valley with low exposure to the sun in 2007 to “save a glacier,” carried out under the auspices of Andina, a branch of Codelco, a national mining company that has the largest impact on rock glaciers in the world. This effort resonates historically with a mitigation strategy that the mining company Barrick Gold proposed in 2001 for Pascua-Lama, which in 2006 triggered an international controversy that resulted in the world’s first draft glacier bill, still under debate in the Chilean Congress, and which subsequently informed a proposal for a new constitution in Chile, rejected in 2022. This article argues that the underlying assumption behind glacier relocation initiatives is that glaciers are detachable elements from the landscape, composed of homogeneous and inert ice, the transformations of which are reversible. This assumption contrasts with conceptions of glaciers arising from earth system science and contemporary biology, which conceive of them as heterogeneous ecosystems bound to their surroundings, the eventual destruction of which is ultimately irreversible. The differences between these conceptions resonate with contrasting narratives of the place humans occupy in Earth’s history, which we term anthropocentric and planetary , according to which humans are conceived of, respectively, as masters of or in precarious balance with Earth’s history.