From Svalbard to the Central Valley

Stan State Professor Explores Climate Change Connection to the Region During Arctic Adventure

By Lori Gilbert

He watched, entranced as a pod of beluga whales circled and fed around the three-masted ship on which he sailed, with underwater microphones picking up their calls to one another.

He hiked across frozen tundra with vegetation no more than a few inches high and alongside glaciers with their blue-hued beauty, walked close to walruses, and donned swim trunks and dove into the Arctic Ocean amid floating ice blocks, for a few seconds, knowing anything longer could turn life threatening.

The images and moments that History Professor Phil Garone experienced on a nearly three-week summer research expedition in Svalbard, a largely ice-covered Norwegian archipelago located midway between the northern tip of mainland Norway and the North Pole, will last a lifetime.

The experiences will benefit Stanislaus State students, too.

Garone plans to utilize visual materials from this June 2023 trip to develop a new class on the history of climate change; this was the research project he proposed that earned him acceptance into The Arctic Circle’s residency program, as one of 30 artists, scientists and educators from 10 countries. They included his wife, Teresa Bergman, chair of the Department of Communication at University of the Pacific.

He will develop this new (and as yet untitled) history course this fall, with the goal of offering it for the first time in the 2024-25 academic year.

Svalbard is at the epicenter of global climate change, where average temperatures are increasing faster than anywhere else on earth.

“The connection I hope to make is to look at this place where climate change is happening so rapidly and see the effects it has on our students’ local community and their families and loved ones,” Garone said. “How does climate change manifest itself here?”

Drought, heatwaves, water shortages and the spread of tropical and semitropical diseases to more northern latitudes are some of the impacts that students have already experienced. The climate changes in California’s Central Valley trickle down from what is happening thousands of miles away as ice in the Arctic melts.

“I want to show how climate change is happening in places that are going to cause sea levels to rise, that are going to cause ocean currents to change, that, in turn, are going to change climate where we live,” Garone said. “Unless you can see what’s happening there, you can’t see what’s causing the things that are happening here. Everybody talks about climate change in the Arctic and students have some notion of that in their minds, but to be able to see these places scientists are talking about and see the evidence of what is happening, I think, I hope, will make it easier to connect what’s happening in the Arctic to what’s happening here in the middle of the Central Valley.”

In addition to the stories he’ll share about the adventure, of twice-daily landings dedicated either to grueling hikes in special boots to accommodate the deep mud of glacial moraines and ice fields in snow covered terrain or to contemplative research, Garone will choose from the 700 photos and a bit of video he captured on the 15-day sailing venture and few days in Longyearbyen, the only major settlement in Svalbard (population about 2,500) and the northernmost permanently inhabited place of any size on earth, to share with his students.

The proposed course is an extension of work Garone has done for the duration of his 17 years as a Stan State professor of history.

“Out of the 10 different courses I teach here, five of them have a significant climate change component,” he said.

The new course will have historical, scientific and policy components and will look at consequences and possible solutions and remedies, Garone said. What it won’t have is a sense of hopelessness.

“The goal is to make people aware and make them want to do something themselves,” Garone said. “I want to inspire people to do something about this and not think it’s hopeless, because it’s not hopeless. It’s a question of how far climate change is going to go and how much we can rein it in.”

Garone joined the history faculty at Stan State in 2006 after earning his doctorate in U.S. history, specializing in environmental history, and a master’s degree in ecology from UC Davis.

Having just completed two terms as chair of the History Department, Garone is taking a year’s research leave not only to develop his new climate change course but also to work on his second book — a human and ecological history of the terminal lakes (lakes with no natural outlet) in the Great Basin of the American West from the late Pleistocene Epoch (about 15,000 years ago) to the present. His first book in 2011 was entitled “The Fall and Rise of the Wetlands of California’s Great Central Valley.”

He’ll spend his time filled with rich memories of his trip, which have given Garone a fresh perspective.

“It’s too cold for agriculture and other than one town there are no cities there, so it really does feel like walking back in time into the ice age,” he said.

Wildlife that adapted to the polar climate is now threatened. Glaciers are melting.

Hearing about those events is important because what is happening in the Arctic will ultimately impact the rest of the world. Being able to see it, to look at images of the changes for themselves, will make climate change more real for Stan State students.