Networking Palcacocha: Digital Infrastructures of Security, Sustainability, and Risk in an Age of Glacial Retreat

Keywords: Infrastructrure, disaster, risk, glaciers, climate change, networks, mountains, GLOFs, floods, Andes, Peru
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 60

Abstract

This paper examines a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) early warning system in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru, as an environmental infrastructure of risk, security, and sustainability. Glacial lakes like Palcacocha (above), swollen by meltwater as Andean glaciers recede, pose acute flooding risks to downstream communities due to their massive water volume and the inherent instability of the moraines and mountains which contain them. Such an outburst flood occurred in 1941 when an avalanche caused Palcacocha’s terminal moraine to rupture, killing an estimated 1800 people in the city of Huaraz; today the Peruvian government estimates as many as 50,000 lives are at risk. Accordingly, international initiatives have begun in the Andes and elsewhere to reinforce glacial lake moraines with dams and sluices, actively siphon water out of particularly unstable lakes, and install comprehensive early warning systems relying on a networked infrastructure of cameras, antennas, towers, satellites, phones, and alarms to monitor water levels and seismic activity in order to give residents precious minutes to escape uphill should a flood event occur. I take a media-theoretical approach to understanding this early warning infrastructure as an attempt to render the instability of mountain environments, and the catastrophe of global climate change, manageable, sustainable, and survivable. I outline the system’s technical functioning, analyze accompanying discourses of risk and security, and trace the different environmental and managerial temporalities in play. What, I ask, can such a system tell us about contemporary climate politics, and what it means to live with mountains in the shifting present?