Vol. 1 No. 1 (2024)
Research

‘Wonderful Productions of The Frigid Zone’: Polar Ice and Climate Change in Early Nineteenth-Century British Discourse

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  • Björn Billing
Björn Billing
Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3197/whpcch.63842135436334

Published 2024-09-16 — Updated on 2024-11-18

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Keywords

  • polar ice,
  • climate change,
  • the Arctic,
  • William Scoresby Jr,
  • Little Ice Age,
  • cold
    • ...More
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How to Cite

Björn Billing. (2024). ‘Wonderful Productions of The Frigid Zone’: Polar Ice and Climate Change in Early Nineteenth-Century British Discourse. Climates and Cultures in History, 1(1), 45–63. https://doi.org/10.3197/whpcch.63842135436334 (Original work published September 16, 2024)

Copyright (c) 2024 Björn Billing

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

In 1818 the British Admiralty launched an Arctic expedition. The immediate stimulus was recent reports from whalers of a significant decrease in polar ice, a condition interpreted by some natural philosophers as an indication of impending climate change. Such a warming would affect not only the Arctic but also the European climate, with profound consequences, possibly beneficial for British agriculture and commerce. These ideas were widespread but not uncontested. Polar ice appeared as a natural wonder that called for scientific attention, just as it appealed to the Romantic artists. This article investigates this British discourse at the threshold of modern climatology during the final phase of the Little Ice Age. It puts our current climate debates about the cryosphere, deep time and geoengineering into historical perspective.

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