GLIMS & THE WAR. GLIMS has no official action or statement about Russia's aggressions. The Board of Directors for my nonprofit glacier-monitoring group, GLIMS (Global Land Ice Measurements from Space, www.glims.org, which I cofounded, directed for a dozen years, and now am a Board member) had an extended discussion about what to do or say, noting that GLIMS has contributors from dozens of countries, including both Russia and Ukraine. Here, I speak for myself, but the unprovoked Russian attacks against Ukraine and threats against the broader world have triggered global revulsion, including across the GLIMS Board. In framing the official stance of GLIMS, we must weigh other matters, especially the greater good of the world. GLIMS, being a climate-change-relevant group, is dedicated to a set of scientific goals (such as global monitoring of glaciers) that transcend borders and all of the world's human and non-human inhabitants. I give one example: some GLIMS researchers (myself included) are active in addressing glacier hazards, which sometimes involve a glacier in one country triggering events that harm a bordering country; the transborder nature of glacier hazards includes Russia and bordering countries. In a broader sense, because Earth has a global hydrosphere and atmosphere and climate system, all glaciers are global. The GLIMS Board is also not blind to the fact that some Russian scientists, being educated and logically minded people, and sharing the same overwhelming motivation to help humans do better for the Earth, are likely to think similarly about the war; but they have more personally at stake than non-Russian/non-Ukrainian scientists. GLIMS and the whole field of glaciology is different than McDonalds, tennis, and Mars exploration. It's not that glaciologists are more important than other collaborative sectors that are severing relations; it's that the Earth is more important than everything else. GLIMS could, hypothetically, limit Russia in GLIMS. This would have no effect other than diminishing the global relevance of glacier datasets. GLIMS could issue an official statement explaining our inaction, but that, too, could have unintended harmful effects. I personally feel that an unofficial explanation for official GLIMS silence must be provided to our Ukrainian and Ukrainian ex-pat colleagues and also our Russian and Russian ex-pat GLIMS colleagues. This statement reflects my own views and is not the public stance of GLIMS.
