During our Glacial Movements & The Ghaib expedition, I was struck by the immense power of water and its capacity to alter a landscape. Water can carve out channels over millennia, but it can also move much faster, causing flash floods. The landscape is in flux, as land slides and glaciers creak, sending ice and rocks continuously from mountain tops. As water moves around the planet, it has the potential to travel for thousands of miles, through several different states.

In her text Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis describes how water connects human and non-human beings. When we take a sip from a glass of water, we are intimately connected to oceans, glaciers and rivers – as well as each other.

In this act of ingestion, we come into contact with all of our companion species that inhabit the watershed from which that water was drawn—book lice, swamp cabbage, freshwater mussel. But we connect with the sedimentation tanks, and rapid-mix flocculators that make that water drinkable, and the reservoir, and the rainclouds, too. [...] Water connects the human scale to other scales of life, both unfathomable and imperceptible. We are all bodies of water, in the constitutional, the genealogical, and the geographical sense. (Neimanis, 2012, 98-99)

Water and ice not only connect us to landscapes on Earth, they exist beyond Earths’ atmosphere. As we visited Eagles Nest at night, looking at the night sky from a high-altitude location, I was reminded of how our Earth resembles other planets and moons in our solar system. Glacial structures exist in the Polar regions of Mars, and Saturn’s Moon Enceladus is a vast world of ice. NASA describes comets as cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, ice, rock and dust that orbit the sun. Comets contain ice that can travel through the outer regions of our solar system. In similarity to ice on Earth, this material has the power to transform planetary landscapes, and allow us to imagine what other ice-worlds may exist deep into the cosmos.

Looking back at our warming planet, as glaciers and polar regions melt, we are reminded that our Earth provides the ideal environment for human and non-human life to exist. Currently, we are in the midst of a climate crisis and areas of our planet are already becoming inhabitable. As temperatures rise and weather becomes more extreme and unpredictable, more environments will become inaccessible for human and non-human beings. In the vast expanse of time and space, our Earth is the only planet that we know of, which contains complex forms of life. For this reason, it is important to take steps towards preserving the health of our planet.

Neimanis, A. (2019) Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Environmental Cultures Series. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Website: www.melaniek.co.uk