Saving the Smallest Lives Drowning in Meltwater on Swiss Glaciers
Text / Yuan Xiao
NEW ART Bazaar Art 2024-06-26
Saving the Smallest Lives Drowning in Meltwater on Swiss Glaciers
Original by Xing Zhihui, Han Haha NOWNESS Now 2025-07-20 21:31 Guangdong
The dog days have arrived, and everyone is worrying about ice. Extreme heat leaves us parched, blacked out, and fainting; the uncertainties brought by a warming climate have intruded into daily life, forming a contemporary suspense. From Swiss glaciers to ice factories in Kunshan, we trace the origin of the ice in the whiskey glass in our hands—what mountain’s melt did it come from?
This is the first piece in the “Biting Wind” series. We follow artist Long Pan to Switzerland to seek the smallest lives that emerge on land newly exposed by glacier melt.
Ice cave formed by glacier melt, Switzerland
Last autumn, artist Long Pan began field research focused on fungi and glaciers—her third trip to glaciers. In the two months prior, she first accompanied a research team into the Kunlun Mountains as a photographer, then flew to Yunnan to traverse the Yulong Snow Mountain.
In Switzerland, Long Pan’s destination was a patch of exposed ground behind the Grimsel Passhöhe dam in the Alps. Fifty years ago this site was still covered by thick ice. Accompanied by a mycologist, Long Pan set foot on this ecological enclave formed by glacier retreat, attempting, before the hydropower company raises the dam, to rescue the endangered fungi growing there.
On topographic maps glaciers are marked in white, blue, and shaded lines—the closer one gets to a glacier, the more apt the depiction feels.
Compacted snow forms ice that is essentially white; from crevices or certain angles it appears as a blue ice wall, like a solid wave. As for the shadows, a few steps onto the glacier make clear that a glacier is far from the flawless image people imagine. Black‑gray rock debris covers its surface like Oreo crumbs scattered without restraint on sea‑salt ice cream—impossible to ignore. These are the tills carried by millennia of glacial movement. When the sun is absent, the “dirty ice” seems deeper and more unfathomable.
Wooden stakes marking glacier subsidence
Wrapped in a not‑very‑thick down jacket, Long Pan stood on a rocky terrace and gazed out: the glacier resembled a frozen river separating the valley. Thanks to excellent infrastructure, exploring glaciers in Switzerland is like strolling a back garden; cable cars deliver daily visitors who hobble along nearly 4,000‑meter trails, gasp at its steepness and glittering surface.
Local villagers are the best guides for both tourists and scientists. They drive a thin wooden stake into the ice and mark graduations to measure surface subsidence. “The guide found two marks on the stake, drew a cut of at least three or four centimeters with his hand, and told me that this was the change over the past week.” Those few centimeters became Long Pan’s most direct bodily sense of warming. She said that glaciers are enormous; without the damp water stains on the stake as a marker, even if the ice surface had shifted dozens of kilometers it would be hard to perceive with the naked eye.
Above: Kunlun icefield
Below: “Dendrite: -12℃ RH85%,” 2024
As glaciers retreat, rock and soil are exposed. Wind brings plant seeds and fungal spores that land and grow randomly on formerly ice‑covered ground, forming symbioses that include endangered species. In the Alps, such an ecological enclave can sprout in only fifty years.
“I took a photo where the mycologist pushed aside the grass and pointed out a mushroom. Only later did I realize what I thought was the mushroom was actually his red nail polish. The real fruiting body under his fingertip was only a fifth the size of a fingernail,” Long Pan recalls.
Few care for this accidental ecological enclave beyond the mycologist. The greater stakes tied to glacier melt are the vast potential energy it releases—Switzerland has the world’s highest density of dams. Melting accelerates; in summer a glacier can lose 10 centimeters of height per day. Hydropower companies propose raising existing dams to store more energy for power generation and irrigation—don’t let it go to waste. But the newly formed reservoirs will drown ecological enclaves and submerge the species that live there.
The mycologist Long Pan accompanied was thus commissioned by the hydropower firm to work on that land, tasked with a three‑year rescue “relocation” of fungi. Yet fungi grow only briefly each summer, and only when the mycologist’s timing permits entry—over three years, there may be only one or two months of effective fieldwork. During that time the mycologist must find endangered fungi, dig out the soil they attach to, move them to higher ground—places that won’t be inundated—and wait, ultimately issuing a report proving that they, or at least one species among them, can still survive.
“Can they really live? It’s deeply suspenseful. But once the rescue action exists, the proposal can be fast‑tracked,” Long Pan says. Many species are entwined on that enclave, and if even one small fungus survives, it could facilitate government approval to raise the dam.
Because dam construction is already a fait accompli.
Fungi growing on the reservoir‑bound ecological enclave, Switzerland
Long Pan became one of the few people in the world to have seen these mushrooms. Perhaps first it is worth explaining why she went to such lengths to reach them.
In 2022, during China’s hottest summer in 61 years, Long Pan traveled to Shangri‑La to track matsutake. “That year yields were extraordinarily low and prices soared.” There she learned that matsutake are prophets of climate change. “This fungus that must live symbiotically with trees may take over thirty years to establish a symbiotic relationship and begin fruiting. But if temperature rises by 5 degrees Celsius—even for less than a week—they can rapidly disappear from that area. The damage is utterly thorough.”
Despite their vulnerability to warming, such organisms also possess resilience beyond human presence. Long Pan says disappearing fungi aren’t wholly extinct; spores lie dormant in soil. As glaciers melt, scientists find them beneath ancient ice and re‑cultivate them—ancient fungi can awaken again.
After fieldwork on the enclave, Long Pan rested with the mycologist in a nearby hut where passing scientists overnight. “This enclave is a treasure for understanding natural processes—how nature self‑repairs without human intervention, how species rebuild symbioses,” she remembers. Everyone there hoped the mycologist would publish his findings so more people would know of the vibrant site beneath the glacier and that it would be drowned by a reservoir. Everyone, that is, except the mycologist himself.
“I tend to romanticize scientists as heroic, but this trip made me understand his anxious emotions.” The mycologist knew the urgency and necessity of saving the enclave, yet employed, his work also accelerates the site’s demise. He feared losing his livelihood. Yet in others’ eyes only he could see and present the problem.
Above: “Black Current Age,” Yulong Snow Mountain ice surface, 2024
Below: Meltwater splashing, Kunlun Mountains
A similar entanglement is why Long Pan embarked on the Swiss glacier research. Long accompanying scientists into the field shaped and hemmed her—“I initially couldn’t find the relatively free, carefree state of a creator; instead I felt overly responsible. We often say humans must be responsible to nature, but that responsibility is hard to pin on any single individual.”
In Shangri‑La she visited a village that both grows matsutake and hosts a mine. Wide straight roads were built for transport trucks, a contrast to winding, bumpy footpaths in neighboring villages. There, aside from selling seasonal matsutake and mountain produce or barley, villagers have little other income.
Long Pan asked a village boy whether leasing the sacred mountain to mining companies didn’t risk divine punishment. The boy replied, the deity cannot read contracts. The god punishes those who directly harm it, while villagers who operate behind the scenes continue to enjoy its protection.
Above: Ice surface beneath glacial sand and gravel, Switzerland
Below: Wind‑eroded mushroom‑shaped rocks, Kunlun Mountains
“People need to survive; they cannot live on faith alone and starve in the mountains. Violating beliefs, they need consoling rationalizations. We speak about the balance between humans and nature as if courting—ambiguous. But ecological issues are visceral, flesh‑and‑blood. It’s basically ‘I want to eat your flesh; but how much can I consume that lets you live and lets me live too,’” Long Pan says.
On the Swiss enclave she again felt this wrenching contradiction: to save fungi and study natural processes, or to build dams and store water for energy and economic benefit—which weighs more?
A few days after the interview, Long Pan sent a news alert: in Valais, near the village of Blatten, thermal imaging showed Birchi Glacier shifting from blue to brown—signaling the massif sliding toward the village at accelerating speed. Three days later, authorities ordered evacuations. Brown patches spread. On May 28 Birchi Glacier finally collapsed. Massive ice, rock, and mud surges thundered down, colliding and roaring with destructive force into the valley. In an instant, 90% of the village was buried under dust that blotted out the sky.
Previously, glacier collapse occurred mostly in remote polar regions, often unnoticed. Now it is close enough to be impossible to ignore.
Above: Ice fissure, Yulong Snow Mountain
Below: Vehicle trapped in torrent formed by glacier meltwater, Kunlun Mountains
Two months before arriving in Switzerland, Long Pan had joined a research team as a photographer to the Kunlun range. Arriving in the glacier interior in the morning, the Gobi lay flat ahead with a thin trickle; four or five hours later on return, trickles had swollen into a raging river. Sitting in the car on the same road, Long Pan watched meltwater rise from the tires to the car’s waistline. “The difficulty and danger of crossing that river made me fear I might actually drown there.”
One month later she traveled with a glacier scientist into Yulong Snow Mountain. Increasingly many ice canyons were opening; meltwater eroded ice into steeper, deeper fissures. To reach the summit one must walk amid jagged ice spikes. Crevices reach into the glacier’s interior; below lie dark rivers to unknown ends—one misstep and a person disappears. Lacking stamina, Long Pan fell behind. “Beforehand, glacier photos made it look like a fairyland, all white and fluffy. But sitting on the ice, inching forward by sliding my bum, flanked by crevices that seemed ready to pull me in, with scarce oxygen—sweating cold and unable to call out—I understood how harrowing even walking can be.”
Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland
“Living long in a city dulls one to nature’s danger. Even amid looming crises, we feel safe. But fieldwork—just go a little farther where signals are weak and infrastructure sparse—crisis awakens. It humbles you and shakes your numbness,” Long Pan says. Climate change must be felt in the body.
But how can those who cannot approach glaciers feel present? In the Swiss hut she and the scientists discussed whether art can be useful. In her experience, “scientists are always extremely busy with concrete tasks, while artists are like schoolchildren—curious about everything, trailing behind asking ‘play with me, play with me’.” Equal collaboration between the two professions is rare.
Beneath Swiss glaciers, Long Pan shared a mood of futility with scientists. In the hut she recounted her work Wonderland Intersection—after the 2018 waste leak from a petrochemical company in Quangang, Fujian, nearby fishing grounds were heavily polluted, corroding boats and burning fishermen. She designed a mushroom boat that metabolizes oil: in the video, an old fisher rows solo across empty waters toward the petrochemical zone. The work is both emblematic of futility and a manifestation of courage.
“Erosion at 37℃,” 2024
That evening scientists in the hut discussed seriously how art might present scientific findings and the urgency of ecological crises. “I realized I act as a bridge of communication, using a more sensorial mode to awaken concern. I turn field impressions into works that need not bear moral or scientific responsibility. I’m not a scientist; I can create playing with erroneous hypotheses—that permission to play is precious and essential. I don’t want merely to present apocalyptic spectacles; what we face is everyday, complex predicaments.”
Before leaving the Aletsch Glacier, Long Pan scooped a bottle of meltwater from an ice lake—her gift to Professor Che, the glaciologist who led her into Yulong’s crevices. In a message to him she described traces of glacier melt elsewhere on Earth and closed: “I heard your department has stopped recruiting! Indeed, how can concern for the environment compete with employment? Perhaps that’s why people think environmental issues are ‘a wanton luxury.’ Take care, brother.”
Letter from Long Pan to Professor Che.