I had joined Diana’s lab to study soil ecology. Diana’s office was located just down the hall from her graduate student mentees, close enough to overhear her passionate discussions around science, perhaps planning a new assay in the lab or upcoming field work. But quick professional negotiations were broken when I entered her office for a meeting. “Jowayyyyy,” she welcomed me in a comical raspy voice. “Get me my Parliaments,” she joked, invoking a story of a chain smoking neighbor she grew up around who loudly requested cigarettes from her daughter. Joking aside, she was intentional in her mentorship, sharing guidance but always listening, open to learning from me. “What do you think about…. Did you consider it this way…. Can we try something like this?” Even so, by the end of our meeting she’d have guided us far off topic. “Tater Tot. What a great name for a Minnesota pitbull!”
At weekly lab meetings, the team discussed plans for fieldwork studying soils of diverse ecosystems across sites in Bangladesh, Alaska, and Peru. At the time, I expected fall courses, teaching assistant duties, and some grunt work around the lab as the newest member of our group. But Diana had a vision for graduate students different from the tradition of putting them through the wringer to earn their keep. She eschewed the “rites of passage” or the “back in my day” that others perpetuated within academia. Just a few weeks after joining Diana’s lab, I opened an email from her. “I have been rethinking my trip to Alaska, and I think that I do need some more help and it would be good for you to see the site. Are you available to go the week of October 5?” No hierarchy in place would preclude a new member from jumping into travel to faraway field sites. I was elated.
I first spotted the spectacular blue ice of the mountain-cradled Mendenhall glacier from a Safeway parking lot in Juneau, Alaska. I stood with Diana outside the grocery store in early October, both of us chomping on Brach’s mellowcreme pumpkins, purchased moments before along with more orthodox field supplies. The glacier emanated a coolness that drew my attention from the rattling of shopping carts on uneven pavement. The fall breeze carried an icy draught miles across the valley, wrapping me in the first glacier I would come to know.
After Safeway shopping and other preparations for our field work, we drove down the Mendenhall Valley, an expanse that the glacier had once covered. By the time we reached the visitor’s center we were peering over a landscape that had been exposed to sunlight for only the last century. The distance to the glacier, now largely covered by a glacial lake, provided a visual indication of a startling recession, the glacier’s former expanse ceded over recent decades.
On a first visit to a glacier, one is shocked by the visible fragility of the hulking ice. Ask anyone who has returned from their trip to Alaska or Iceland, still reeling in disbelief that such fathomless, ancient ice is melting out of existence at their tiny, insignificant feet. Glaciers show global surface temperatures climbing, a reflection of climate not seen in over one-hundred thousand years. In the past twenty years or so, Alaskan glaciers have accounted for a quarter of all glacial mass loss globally, and by the end of the century these glaciers are expected to lose over a quarter of their own ice.
From the lake, the glacier reaches miles up into the mountains where the Juneau Ice Field has accumulated for over 3,000 years. At its foot, where the flowing ice terminates, the glacier appears as a field of snow interrupted by contorted geometries of radiant-blue crystalline ice, bent by relentless forces driving it down the mountain. With a quick glance the ice seems unchanging, as depicted in postcards. But this ice has traveled for some two-hundred years, coursing and crushing down the mountain to arrive here.
This too is the nature of the science that Diana shared with me, knowledge tied to far deeper legacies than its present day state. In bringing me to the glacier, Diana shared a long history of investigations into ecosystem ecology, evolved and ever-changing, passed down from her mentors and theirs before them. The process of science is not to establish rigid facts, but to advance under the force of prior knowledge, challenging itself, and breaking open to catch new light and reveal unexpected tints and tones.
We crossed the glacial lake with our collaborators by boat. The glacier bellowed with the rumble of an organ’s lowest octaves, pushing cold air toward us, freezing my windward face as we approached it. With splitting crackles and whooshing release, slabs of ice calved and crashed into the water on occasion. The eastern edge of the glacier spit a gushing stream of meltwater that ricocheted off ice and rock into the lake. The very definition of a glacier is one of movement, ice flowing under its own weight. As with most landscapes, a moment of considerate observation unveils a world of motion.
At the glacier’s edge we sought the coarse, calcareous soils recently uncovered from beneath the melting ice. We planned to observe, sample, and analyze the underlying substrate to understand how ecosystems build themselves from the ground up, starting with the tiniest miracles of microbes in the dirt and debris. Together, we stood at the glacier’s snout. The soils just emerging from the ice were rocky and inorganic; yet, those meters away, after several years of development, looked relatively rich, taking on a finer texture, hosting moss and alder saplings. Sampling the chemistry and microbes in such young, developing soils could reveal the details of how a nascent forest arises from nothing but glaciated rock. I headed to soils uncovered from the glacier just a few years prior and slid our sterilized tools under the surface to collect small samples from around young alder trees and bare patches of ground. We packed the soils into coolers and later processed them in the lab, extracting microbial DNA and the nutrients the soils held in their pores and aggregates. We ran our samples on analyzers to quantify these soil characteristics and crunched numbers in an attempt to see the transformations these soils embodied.
Diana guided our group around the landscape to conduct the planned fieldwork. Our conceptions of glaciers as monolithic landscapes moving at geologic timescales slipped away as we stepped across uncertain earth around the ice. Moraines crumbled under our boots like sand through fingers, and glacial meltwater carved shifting rivulets through the sediments. The glacier would never occupy the landscape as it did that day—nor would we.
The word “ablate” is used to describe both the melting of a glacier and the surgical removal of cancer, changes that bring us to reckon with our existence, the loss of the core features in one’s landscape. Just over five years after the first trip to Mendenhall, Diana called my cell phone. As was often the centerpiece of our scientific conversation, she had news of sometimes unbelievable, profound changes in the world. This time her own brain was accumulating and receding with a glioblastoma tumor. I was at a loss for words, so Diana helped me step into the roar of the changed world she faced. We would be in touch as she figured out next steps, as a scientist might, with a sense of a process ahead to reveal what was happening under the surface of her own body. But after hanging up I still didn’t know what to say, how to navigate such a shifting reality, and what this would mean for Diana’s life to come. I’ve forgotten the details or blocked out much of whatever we said on that call. There was nothing certain to hold onto; terra firma melting away. I later Googled “glioblastoma.” The five-year survival rate for glioblastoma is less than 7%; the average length of survival is eight months. A world that once felt solid was, in fact, always in motion.
During our field work, Diana had pointed out that the tousled soils next to the retreating Mendenhall glacier were littered with a lost past: ancient carbon, millenia-old wood scraps masticated and spit back out by the glacier. And, at the same time these soils were young and undeveloped, a newly exposed canvas upon which ecosystems would build themselves over upcoming centuries. Revelation is found even here in the painful changes of the anthropocene, incredible stories of renewal revealed in loss. In her mentorship Diana not only shared scientific knowledge, but also gnosis of transformation: ancient to new, loss to life.
Science had long viewed the soils left in glaciers’ wake as barren and void of life. The lifelessness of these soils, ascribed from the limitation of human point of view, was a foregone conclusion until microbiologists mustered the courage to head outside their labs with their magnified perspectives, Petri dishes, microscopes, and DNA sequencing in hand. They, including Diana in her early career, revealed that even in the scoured soils of melting mountain glaciers, the smallest life, against all odds, makes quick work of settling in. Cyanobacteria, such as Nostoc, growing in green filaments, pull nitrogen and carbon—the stuff of food, biomass, and DNA—right out of the atmosphere when the soils are too brutal to provide it. Then come the spiders, catching the wind with gossamer sails. In a tactic known as ballooning, spiderlings have been known to travel hundreds of miles, wafted in the air by the threads of their silk, eventually landing, perhaps, on uninhabited glacial till as fortuitous colonizers. Wind blown spores deliver mosses and fungi to the rocky soils that increasingly begin to look like dirt. As soils improve, the first seed plants that take hold have abilities to grow fast and withstand disturbance, some working closely with bacteria and fungi that deliver nutrients in exchange for the plants’ sugars concocted out of water, sun, and air. In time, by bacteria, spider, spore, and seed a new ecosystem arises—life from ice and rock.
On a visit to Durham a couple months after Diana’s diagnosis and surgery, we planned new analyses for my dissertation and discussed a theoretical paper based around our deepest scientific conversations on how ecosystems assemble, which we would later publish. After we had discussed work, Diana asked me if I had anywhere to be. Of course not, I was there to see her. She then asked if I wanted to walk with her to her radiation appointment at the Oncology Center. We walked and fell into the comfort, or diversion, of friendly conversation. Here, however, I began to detect the reality that through Diana’s positivity and continued engagement with life there was also a sinking doubt. I fumbled in our conversation, trying to make space for her to share what she wished. We mostly stuck to silver linings and saving graces. Perhaps the only way to say what I wanted was to walk with her, to be there.
Words feel so inept for responding to an ongoing process of loss. Maybe it is most important that we are at least there to walk with it and then try to find the words. In fact, so much of the science that we conducted tied to glacial loss was simply a practice in observation and an act of witness to our species’ profound, pervasive impact on the earth. In the wake of loss we can also observe the awesome force and azure beauty of glaciers and resurrection of life in their shadows. Even in its melting, in part at our hands, the glacier leaves the gift of all it has wrought: new landscapes and new life that will unfurl into forests and meadows. Loss, in fact, hones our attention and observation with an intensity that we might otherwise never develop, giving us the chance to see the world differently. Far more than with the data and numbers we collect as scientists, I found awe in the paradox of experience Diana brought to view: loss and renewal inextricably entwined.
In her mentorship Diana passed on the tools and thinking to more perceptively consider what is left after loss; she inspired young scientists and longtime colleagues to examine and uncover the wonders of our world in ways never before described, building upon the ever changing, contorting, inertia of science. She devoted herself to teaching her students to embrace life, like the science she shared, defying what we expect of it, our realities to be questioned and revised. In our own studies together at the Mendenhall glacier we documented how the first arriving microbes lay the foundation for an abundant ecosystem to form over the decades that follow. Observing these soils reveals that we do not wield the finality of life: on their own come the bacteria and the spiders, the ancient wood debris once again released and reconfigured into a fresh world.
Visiting Diana takes me to the grassy foothills of Boulder, Colorado, where the prairie reaches up to meet the Rocky Mountains. Just above this spot is the start of open space that leads up to the mountains a few hundred meters beyond. A bustling trail there keeps the cemetery company with the town’s avid hikers and trail runners. I know this cemetery is only a human pretension of some immutable endpoint to life. Diana has moved away into the earth, microbes, plants, and perhaps just up the canyon from this cemetery, where tucked into the continental divide some few, stubborn glaciers still make a home. They are scarcely glaciers now, they are lamentations, they are incunabula.
