Though not traditionally thought of as a key natural resource, glaciers are a crucial part of both our global ecosystem and the sustaining of life around the world. Comprising three quarters of the world's fresh water, they freeze in the winter and melt in the summer, supplying water that is plentiful enough for agriculture and clean enough to drink. Without them many of the planet's rivers would run dry shortly after the winter snow melt. In fact a single midsized glacier in regions like California, Argentina, India, Kyrgyzstan, or Chile can provide an entire community with drinking water for generations.
On the other hand, when global temperatures rise, not only does glacier ice wither away into the oceans but these massive ice bodies can become unstable and cause severe natural events like glacier tsunamis. But glaciers often exist well outside our environmental consciousness, and they are mostly unprotected from atmospheric impacts from transportation emissions or from industrial threats such as the mining industry, which seeks the precious metals that lie beneath them. Glaciers: The Politics of Ice is a scientific, cultural, and political examination of the cryosphere - the earth's ice - and the environmental policies that aim to protect it.Glaciers is a new window into one of the Earth's most crucial natural resources and a call to reawaken our interest in the world's changing climate.

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