I have been reflecting on the notion of glacier sentience.

This idea came after watching the “Requiem for a Glacier” video and hearing of a funeral for a glacier in Nepal. A requiem and a funeral for a glacier and for all glaciers as they melt and fade away with the warmer temperatures brought by climate change.

If a glacier can die, can it once have lived?

If a river can be alive, can a glacier? There is a growing movement to recognize the ‘personhood’ of rivers in Peru, New Zealand, and Canada.

If a glacier once lived, could it have had sentience? How would that sentience take form?

A glacier begins with a single snowflake, unique in its structure, with distinct crystalline patterns. Each snowflake is an individual, never repeated, accumulating with countless others.

The accumulation of snowflakes becomes a repository of possibilities of diversity and interconnection. Diversity recording the air composition, the temperatures, the conditions of long past environments.

As more snowflakes accumulate, they compress under their own weight. With pressure, they transform into glacial ice crystals.

This ice forms layers within the glacier. The top layer is brittle and new, cracking as it moves over uneven terrain like cliffs and boulders. The middle layer is denser with layer upon layer of a history of snowflakes. A history of crystalline diversity and trapped air bubbles. A record of air composition through the millennia.

The bottom layer, subjected to intense pressure, becomes very plastic. This plasticity allows the glacier to flow and move downhill, from where the snowflakes originally fell, possibly hundreds or thousands of years ago.

The thousands of glaciers in Nepal, the Himalaya, and globally, including my home country of Canada, are rapidly melting due to rising temperatures. Glacier preservation requires reducing CO2 emissions.

In the Himalaya and HinduKush, glaciers that are the primary source of water for downstream communities, have been melting at an alarming rate in recent years, posing a significant threat to the region’s livelihoods, biodiversity and ecosystems.

With March 21 becoming the World Day for Glaciers, it serves to raise awareness of the critical role of glaciers, snow, and ice in climate systems, and the economic, social, and environmental conditions of communities and nations.