Dissertation Grant: Temporal Ice: Deciphering Deep Time in the Cryosphere

该项目汇集了历史和地理方面的学术知识，揭示了冰科学研究的历史，以及自然学家和科学家如何利用冰来理解地质时间尺度和预测未来的生态变化。从冰中提取的证据从根本上重新校准了地球深层历史的科学概念：冰河时代的理论揭示了地球的剧烈变化，从冰芯中提取的证据表明地球在不同的气象状态之间快速闪烁。该项目的数据将来自美国、英国和德国国家档案馆收集的文件，并将辅以对已发表的科学论文和视觉材料的分析。总体而言，该项目追溯了过去两百年来我们对冰的科学观念的变化，以突出其对推进对地球作为一个具有深刻过去和深刻未来的相互关联系统的科学理解的重要性。这是对冰冻圈（地球表面被固体冰覆盖的部分）的调查，也是对过去200年来科学家们研究和概念化它的方式的调查。对冰的分析提供了关键的生态数据，使科学家能够了解地球历史的真正深度，并了解环境变化的模式和随时间的系统气象变化。这个多方法项目的数据来自几个国家档案馆的藏品，以及与历史相关的科学论文和视觉模型。系统的定性文献分析将用于分析这些数据，并增强我们对冰冻圈研究如何影响我们对地球环境历史和未来的集体理解的理解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project draws together scholarship from history and geography to uncover the history of scientific research on ice and how it has been used by naturalists and scientists to understand geological timescales and to predict future ecological change. Evidence extracted from ice has fundamentally recalibrated scientific conceptions of earth's deep history: the theory of the Ice Ages revealed the planet's radical changeability, and evidence from ice cores showed a globe that rapidly flickers between different meteorological states. Data for the project will come from documents gathered at national archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and these will be complimented by analyses of published scientific papers and visual materials. Overall, this project traces our changing scientific conceptions of ice over the past two hundred years to highlight its importance for advancing scientific understanding of the planet as an interconnected system with a deep past and a deep future.This is an investigation into the cryosphere - those portions of the Earth's surface that are covered in solid ice - and into the ways in which scientists have studied and conceptualized it over the past two hundred years. Analyses of ice have provided critical ecological data that has enabled scientists to appreciate the true depth of the Earth's history and to understand patterns of environmental change and systematic meteorological variability over time. Data for this multi-method project come from collections at several national archives and from historically relevant scientific papers and visual models. Systematic qualitative documentary analysis will be used to analyze these data and enhance our understanding of how research on the cryosphere has shaped our collective understanding of the environmental history and future of Earth.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.