Sensing the ice: Field science, models, and expert intimacy with knowledge

Abstract

This paper analyses relationships that Antarctic glaciologists (including field scientists, modellers, and those working with remote satellite data) have formed with the Antarctic glacial environment. These relationships contribute to understandings about the tactile and experiential nature of scientific expertise, even when the experts claim to know little scientifically. Expert extrapolations about nature in the absence of data hint at the intimacy of field scientists with the environment with which they work, and of modellers with the virtual worlds with which they interact. However, my research on sensory engagement among scientists also makes apparent the ways in which the embodied and sensorial are not primitive, elemental, basic, or instinctual, but bound up in the complexities of nationalism, scientific translations of scale, and boundary skirmishes over what counts as expertise from within scientific disciplines. Expertise is formed in the spaces between intimate encounters in relationship with the weight of cultural learning that teaches experts-in-the-making how to encounter, analyse, compare, and interpret.