Abstract ID: 3.11908 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

As glaciers have become climate change symbols, and tourism and digital media technologies expand, the online representation of glaciers increasingly feeds responses that melt the cryosphere and impact glacier communities. ‘Last Chance’ glacier tourism utilizes fossil fuel transportation, contributing to climate change and melting glaciers, while the digital profile of glaciers from virtual tourism promotes digital technology developments that feeds this tourism. From the rare-earth mineral and petrochemical extraction necessary for physical transportation and digital media devices to energy and water consumption for storing and sharing digital content, this cycle, the “virtual glacier feedback loop,” spirals on itself: the disappearing glaciers reveal new liminal spaces ripe for mineral and tourism extraction, while glacier melt cools the data centers in which the growing virtual glacier imaginary is stored. But this process is more than a positive feedback loop for ice melt, it leverages old conservation strategies grounded in consumerism and ecotourism with social impacts that leave room for only certain types of land relationships that fit the extractive model. Merging these physical and social ice feedback loops, this research asks: do virtual glaciers melt actual glaciers, and with what consequences for ice and people? The research focuses on Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, homeland of the Huna Tlingít, as a case-study of the changing relationships between protected lands managers, Alaskan Native and local communities, tourism, digital media technologies and the geologically and biologically diverse environment, exploring the intersection of glaciers, conservation, and environmental justice using interdisciplinary and ethnographic research methods. Exposing the virtual glacier feedback loop counters the illusion that glaciers and their communities are isolated, remote problems and instead positions virtual glaciers as a key that reveals a consumer cycle intimately connected to the everyday world through the digital, carbon and water footprints of glacier tourism with important social and environmental consequences.