← Back to Articles | Original (German)
While in previous decades snow was omnipresent in lowlands and cities, the situation has changed - due to climate change. However, if you don't want to do without snow and enjoy the cryosphere, the world covered in snow and ice, you should turn to books. The offerings are diverse and range from opulent illustrated text books to meticulous analyzes of relevant literary classics.
First of all, a text-illustrated book by two experts. Jürg Alean, glaciologist at ETH Zurich, multiple participant in Arctic expeditions, and Michael Hambrey, who studied geography, geology and glaciology, from Aberystwyth University in Wales (UK) have written an opus that is aimed at a broad audience. On 206 pages they present the diversity and multifaceted nature of the different forms of frozen water with impressive photos and understandable texts.
Without an introduction or preface, both go into medias res. Her work is designed as a “journey of discovery” – that is the subtitle of the book. The nine chapters are titled with verbs that describe processes, and subtitles explain the topic areas. At the beginning (page 7ff) it says: “Crystallize, float, sublimate”, i.e. “ice, snow, frost and hail”. Here it is shown how frozen water comes to Earth from the atmosphere.
If you didn't know yet: around a tenth of the earth's land surface is glaciated (page 10). Calculated another way: almost 70 percent of the fresh water on earth is frozen (page 13). The cryosphere, i.e. the entirety of all water in frozen form (including permafrost), is - as this book shows us - more diverse than one would assume a priori. Consequently, chapter two (page 27ff) is about “snow, snow cover and avalanches”, i.e. “glittering, covering, spilling”.
The world of glaciers is also shown and illustrated with impressive, partly historical images, with their retreat naturally being the subject. Examples of this are three pictures of the Gaisbergferner (page 73) in the southern Ötztal (Tyrol) from 1872 (maximum extent), 2012 (massive loss of the valley glacier) and 2023 (glacier without old snow remnants and without snow growth).
Scene change to the polar regions. Here, the calving of glaciers triggers powerful surge waves before the broken piece of inland ice floats in the sea as an iceberg (image sequence: page 79). The proverbial tip of an iceberg comprises ten to 20 percent of its volume, the rest, i.e. the "keel", is under water and can pose a danger to boats and ships. While there are dangers associated with the increasing thawing of the permafrost in the Alpine region (rockfalls, etc.), in Siberia the permafrost extends to depths of up to 1,500 meters (page 141). Of course, it also thaws there every summer by a few decimeters to a few meters.
The chapter on ice ages (“solidification, spreading, disappearance”) starting on page 157 is informative. This is not only about the variety of shapes in ice age-shaped landscapes with boulders and moraine walls, but also about the associated sea level fluctuations. The land around the Baltic Sea is rising by up to nine millimeters per year (page 176). The reason for this is the lack of weight of the ice masses that have melted since the last ice age. The technical term for this would be: isostasy.
The second book was written by the literary scholar Cornelia Blasberg. She analyzed texts by selected authors, including German poets such as Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Wilhelm Müller, the English writer Mary Shelley, and works by the Dane Hans Christian Andersen, who achieved world fame through his fairy tales. The common denominator is that snow is "an indispensable prerequisite for plot, figure drawing, metaphor and aesthetic arrangement" (page 14). What can be seen in the texts is the influence of religion, superstition, myths and natural history knowledge, which people still associate with snow to this day.
Blasberg's thesis is that whoever perceives snow makes use of a wide range of cultural meanings. This idea is made clear through a differentiated examination of the painting "Hunters in the Snow" (Winter) by Pieter Bruegel (1565) on pages 28 and 29, or in Room X of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. On the surface there is a snowy winter landscape. However, if you go into detail, you can see another level in all the large and small figures and details of the painting; Connections that refer to the Bible. Apparently funny-looking ice skaters represent the slipperiness of life, the danger of slipping and committing sins. The black birds are reminiscent of the ravens from the flood story. There they did not return to Noah's Ark as false spies. From the 18th century onwards, the religious symbolism of snow was joined by political, natural-philosophical and psychological influences.
From the first half of the 19th century onwards, there was increasing differentiation in the natural sciences. Numerous sub-disciplines, such as meteorology, glaciology and geosciences, are discovering their interest and their specific perspective on snow, glacier landscapes and ice caves. Systematic measurements, continuous observations and meticulous descriptions do not stop at snow in all its manifestations. Writers are now faced with the task of integrating this well-known but now formally redefined snow as a natural substance into their poetry.
This change can be clearly seen using the example of Adalbert Stifter's (1805 to 1868) numerous snow stories. Important to this is Stifter's belief that writers can not only write well, but also have to be as well trained as possible in every discipline (page 176). He was influenced by the mathematician and physicist Andreas von Baumgartner (1793 to 1865) and the geographer Friedrich Simony (1813 to 1896).
Simony's watercolor "The Interior of a Glacier Cave in the Karlseisfeld" (1842) served Stifter as a concrete template for passages in his story "Bergkristall". Briefly the content to remind you of Stifter's Christmas classic: Two children get caught in a snowstorm on the way back from their grandparents, but find shelter in a glacier cave overnight - it is Christmas night - where they are found the next morning.
Stifter describes the cave in question with the meticulousness of a natural scientist ("there were spikes of lace and tassels hanging down"), but in the same way he also gives an idea of the sky and thus religious dimensions (Christmas Night) ("much more beautiful blue than the firmament"). Stifter's original sound (page 190) reads as follows: "But in the entire cavity it was blue, as blue as nothing in the world is, much deeper and much more beautiful blue than the firmament, like sky-blue colored glass through which a light shines. There were thicker and thinner arches, there were jagged lace and tassels hanging down [...]."
Conclusion: “Snow and Ice – A Journey of Discovery to Frozen Worlds” is aimed at a broad audience with impressive images and easy-to-understand texts. "Snow - Inside Views of a Literary Subject" is a literary study that shows the changing reception of snow in a historical context and will convince an interested readership. (Thomas Hofmann, December 26, 2025)