Why ice is our greatest emotional landscape

Ice plays on the human imagination, the object of our fear and fascination. In the Book of Job, the Lord asks: “Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven who hath gendered it?” His wonder is divine and universal, musing on the mysteries of form, the crystalline artifice of concealment. “The waters are hid as if with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.”

We mere mortals might be left quaking in our boots. By its sheer otherness, ice can leave us sliding around in search of meaning, lacking the familiar footholds for experience and expression. But we remain receptive to its changing nature, transported by its appearance and movement, durability and fragility, left solemn at its ultimate impermanence. The opaque surfaces and spangled architectures of ice bring us to see so much more than water in solid state.

Early expeditionary encounters with polar ice were reported in a language of incomprehension. The fictional traveller and real-world explorer struggled to come to terms with its stupendous mass and superabundance. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner was left dumbfounded, unable to find any reasonable likeness: “Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken / The ice was all between.” The 19th-century scientist and whaler William Scoresby Jr recalled landscape imagery familiar to the English countryman: eye-blinding “fields” of ice; giant, distended bergs that birthed “calves”; the disorderly, spiky clutter of “brash”.

As a feature of Romantic art, ice refracted the sentiments of the sublime: terror, awe and dread. In Caspar David Friedrich’s 1824 oil painting The Sea of Ice it stretches to the horizon, spectral, low‑lit, mauve-white. To the fore it lies heaped, umbered and jaundiced, erupting skyward in places. Then, midships on the canvas: the horror! A blackened hull, part concealed, part exposed. Awaiting the slow yawn of summer melt to engulf it. Tellingly, the same work goes by another name: The Wreck of Hope.

Romanticism’s widespread influence resulted in some generic – even derivative – art. Victorian Britain was startled by Edwin Landseer’s depiction of ice as the great destroyer, the driving force in a nightmarish vision. Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864) is a painting animated by two scavenger polar bears tearing ravenously at human remains, a shattered body and a ghost ship wrecked amid the ice pack. Critics found this desolate display of death beyond the pale. Others secretly delighted in the artist’s heavy-handed pathos. Landseer’s reference points were perhaps too real. Search parties sent seeking signs of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, the ships of Sir John Franklin’s expedition that disappeared while exploring the Northwest Passage, returned with little more than rumours of cannibalism. If ice was a graveyard for hubris, what ill-fated future did the artwork anticipate for national virtue and imperial ambition?

For mountaineer writers – and an ever-ready readership of armchair adventurers – glaciers are reimagined as rivers of ice. The irresistible advance of hard matter: muscled, sluggish, scalping the Earth. Confronted in the wild, a glacier can present a barrier to safe passage, or a convenient highway home. Joe Simpson had it both ways in Touching the Void (1988), a classic memoir of mountain catastrophe. In his warping, hallucinatory account of imprisonment in an abyssal crevasse, Simpson grows clear-eyed upon the realisation that nothingness is a most alien thing. If it takes ice-bound extremes such as this to reveal how, in the frailties and agonies of the human condition, there reside mysterious reserves of will, who are we to doubt him?

Elsewhere in literary culture, glaciers also figure as powerful thresholds of experience, cardinal places where the social order is scrambled, magical thinking happens, and the world gets realigned. Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’ novel Under the Glacier (originally published as Christianity at Glacier in his native Icelandic) is plotted through the reports of a young emissary to the Bishop of Iceland, dispatched to visit a remote community said to be troubled by the behavior of its ageing pastor. Their dead are not being buried, the bodies discarded on Snæfells glacier instead. As the story unfolds, provincial goings-on become yet more improbable and dream-like. And to what end? Ice emerges as the distorting mirror, a looking glass with disquieting effects, in which we face a phantasmagoric version of ourselves. Such fictions lead us to wonder how, once interiorised, ice becomes us. It is the substance said to run through the veins of the card sharp, pool hustler, confident trickster and bank robber. It can metabolise differently, like a protective carapace. “Ice without, fire within” was how JB Priestley gave vent to his smouldering passion for Jacquetta Hawkes. She was the union of elemental opposites perfectly embodied in one person.

Ice can have agency, even a personality of its own. By posing the question ‘Do Glaciers Listen?’ anthropologist Julie Cruikshank means us to consider a compelling collision of worldviews, occurring in America’s Pacific northwest at the end of the Little Ice Age. European explorers and aboriginal peoples had contrasting explanations for geophysical events, such as the glacial surges that dramatically altered the coastal landscapes of the Mount Saint Elias ranges. In indigenous cosmologies, glaciers were sentient things, and forces to be reckoned with, known for wrathful reactions to visitors judged to have transgressed certain moral prohibitions.

Nearer home, the finger-wagging figure of speech, “you are skating on thin ice”, channels the voice of parental admonition. The risk inherent to ice – “will it, or won’t it, take my weight?” – is how Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski structured the first instalment of The Decalogue, his 1989-90 cinematic masterpiece anchored by the Ten Commandments. A meditation on scientific reason and religious belief, the opening film follows the lives of a father and son who conduct experiments testing the laws of physics. Personal tragedy unfolds with grim inevitability following the premature discovery of a pair of skates intended as a Christmas gift. “I am the Lord thy God ... thou shalt not have other gods before me.” (Perhaps best to postpone ordering the box set until after the festive season.)

Today, because we know its future is no longer infinite, ice is our greatest emotional landscape. It’s a substance responsive to acts of human folly that we ourselves struggle to control. The future of the cryosphere is a shared burden, expressed both as existential and environmental crisis. Of course, when it comes to ice, literature and the arts don’t have a monopoly on metaphor. Geoscientists are just as partial to the strikingly suggestive image or associative idea. Arguably, none is more compelling than the “two-mile time machine”. Cores deep-drilled out of the Greenlandic ice sheet (the second largest in the world, for now) are perfect retainers of environmental evidence dating back millennia, held fast in annually forming rings of ice. Planetary yesteryears are revisited by research time-teams through vestigial evidence of pollen, pollutants, sea salt and bubbles of ancient air. Herein lie crucial clues to understanding long-term global climate change. Better ways, it is said, to plan for the world after tomorrow.

Radio 3’s Sunday Feature Freeze: Thaw is broadcast on 20 December at 7pm. bbc.co.uk/radio3.