Sea ice out of time: Reckoning with environmental change
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In September 2007, Arctic sea ice plummeted to a shocking record minimum at the time. The amount of ice lost that summer was equal to that lost over the previous 25 years. As Arctic sea ice escapes scientists’ predictions, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have critically interrogated “nature”/“culture” divides that treat the time of nature as unchanging and distinct from human beings. This essay examines what concept of time emerges through Arctic sea ice as an analytic lens. By this, I mean scientific knowledge of sea ice and the conceptual possibilities for thinking ice temporalities and environmental time-reckoning that it opens up. Attending to these possibilities suggests different kinds of “clocks” to help reckon the time of environmental changes in the form of (1) climate anomalies (e.g., deviations in ice thickness), which offer a different way of telling environmental time that attends to the physical specificity of substances; and (2) the Arctic Oscillation, a semi-periodic world weather pattern that emerges from the thick of relationships among ice, atmosphere, ocean, and now humans, generating a collective planetary time. Finally, I argue that the relational human–nonhuman production of planetary time shifts the focus in social studies of time from collective time-reckoning, which assumes entities have a socioculturally determined concept of time, toward temporal coordination as a less anthropocentric mode of ordering shared realities. Coordination decenters “the Human” as an epistemic ordering principle and enlarges ordering to include a diversity of nonhuman ways of being. Through temporal coordination, environmental prediction would be the ordering of a collective reality that a multiplicity of human and nonhuman ways of being make together rather than the search for a more precise clock, or development of better technoscientific means to capture nonhuman temporalities external to human beings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it