As the climate warms and the hydrological cycle falters, ice is no longer a reliable feature of higher latitudes or winter seasons. What are the consequences of the planet’s waning capacity to cool? In other words, what comes after ice?

This collection examines the implications of the end of consistent freezing and thawing cycles. After Ice gathers experts in a wide range of disciplines to articulate aspects of the cold humanities. They investigate ice and its dynamic properties as a foundational element of Indigenous communities in the Arctic regions, as a commodity with technological and political value, and as a reflection of environmental change and the passage of time.

As the future of the cryosphere is increasingly determined by human behaviour, this thought-provoking exploration envisions ice as both a phase of water and as a milieu for sensemaking. It asks us to consider how to define, describe, and materially characterize our warming world.

Rafico Ruiz is the associate director of research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He is the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier and coeditor, with Melody Jue, of Saturation: An Elemental Politics.

Paula Schönach is the senior adviser in sustainability at the Aalto University School of Business and the director of the CLIMATE-research program of the Strategic Research Council, both in Finland. With Esa Ruuskanen and Kari Väyrynen, she is a coeditor of Suomen ympäristöhistoria 1700-luvulta nykyaikaan (Environmental history of Finland from the eighteenth century to the present).

Rob Shields is the Henry Marshall Tory Research Chair and a professor of human geography and sociology at the University of Alberta. As well as authoring publications such as Spatial Questions: Cultural Topologies and Social Spatialisations, The Virtual, and Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, he has conducted online projects such as wildspirits.ualberta.ca and is the founder of the journal Space and Culture.

Contributors: Hester Blum, Mark Carey, Alenda Y. Chang, Jeff Diamanti, Mél Hogan, Cymene Howe, Emma Kowal, Esther Leslie, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi, Márió Z. Nemes, Jessica O’Reilly, Liza Piper, Joanna Radin, Sarah T. Roberts, Juan Francisco Salazar, Rebecca J.H. Woods

In putting forward the concept of the cold humanities, this book makes a provocative contribution to the field of ice- and cold-related environmental humanities. It is full of excellent scholarship on cold themes and cold places.

Dolly Jørgensen, coeditor of Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments:

After Ice will be useful to open a conversation about melting materialities under changing climates.