I saw something about this elsewhere and decided it had something to do with the movie Frozen.

AMDG

That must be a joke. Right?

If it's a parody, they've got the language of landscape ecology down perfectly.

"...I can't claim to have inspected it very closely."

It starts getting good about halfway through section IV, where it turns out their complaint about traditional glaciology is, basically, that it's too awesome:

"There was what Hevly calls a ‘culture of field science’ in the 19th century that favored ‘authentic, rigorous, manly experience’, and scientists – let alone women – who did not explicitly demonstrate that their glaciological conclusions stemmed from heroic, manly adventures struggled to make their scientific claims credible."

They reel off a despairing list of glaciologists being brave and adventurous and despicably masculine, and then insist that indigenous people's views on glaciers be taken more seriously, which sounds great up until they cite the example of the "knowledge" that glaciers move because they're annoyed by the smell of hot grease. In section VI it turns out the angle you view a glacier from has political overtones:

"Burko also paints glaciers from an aerial, top-down perspective, one that appropriates a gaze generally associated with scientific credibility and accuracy. Such a gaze has been troubled by feminist researchers who argue that the ‘conquering gaze’ makes an implicit claim on who has the power to see and not be seen"

At the end it turns out that this is important because governments keep asking scientists for advice on stuff, but "the natural sciences are not equipped to understand the complexities and potentialities of human societies, or to recognize the ways in which science and knowledge have historically been linked to imperial and hegemonic capitalist agendas".

I suspect this gem will be withdrawn from the internets once it's been linked to enough, so download it now if you're interested...

My bet is that it's genuine. The publication (or site) where it appears seems to be 100% serious. And after a very quick look around, which turned up a number of stories making fun of the paper, the only one I found that seemed to indicate the people taking it as real were getting anything wrong was this story at Gawker (caveat lector) which only claims that the study did not cost $400,000, as some of the people laughing at it are claiming.

If it is indeed a bit of whimsy, it's something on the order of the Sokal hoax. I would love that. But the main author actually is working on climate-related stuff with a $400,000 NSF grant.

It does seem to be real -- from an article on the research on the University of Oregon website, "As glaciers melt, more voices in research are needed":

When UO historian Mark Carey hired Jaclyn Rushing, an undergraduate student in the Robert D. Clark Honors College, to explore how nongovernmental organizations were addressing melting Himalayan glaciers, he got an unexpected return.

Her dive into the literature found that women's voices are rarely heard in glacier-related research, a finding that triggered a larger project and led to a paper now online ahead of print by the journal Progress in Human Geography.

"Jaclyn found a report that noted how women are more vulnerable to glacier changes and hazards than are men," said Carey, associate dean of the Clark Honors College and a professor of history and environmental studies. "I had never researched these gendered vulnerabilities." ...

They found that glacier research has been intertwined with gender relations, masculine cultures of exploration, geopolitics, and individual and institutional power. That, in turn, led to glacier-related academic and governmental jobs being predominantly filled by men.

"Melting glaciers are today considered a national security risk for numerous countries," Carey said. "Power and colonialism have shaped the science." ...

"The root of this paradigm comes from the era of Victorian Imperialism in which manly vigor and scientific discovery provided the dominant way of both understanding and dominating foreign spaces," Rushing said. "This results in a total lack of consideration of alternative ways of understanding glacial ice, which is especially troubling in the current age of rapid melt." ...

The National Science Foundation supported the research as part of a five-year grant to Carey for his studies on glacier-societal interactions.

And alas for the liberal arts, under the banner of which this mentality is nurtured.

It's almost as if science, having risen from the murk of magic, is sinking into something worse. Magic, at least, is fed by the imagination, while this new thing is so damned tedious, and tendentious.

Of course, there are still good scientists, but they will likely be marginalized if they don't toe the mark.

AMDG

And as a former English major I really hate having to say that.

I guess this is as good a place as any to post a link to an episode of Radiolab that I heard last weekend. It's good science, but fairly frightening. I would suggest listening to the two sections called, "Genes on the Move" (from about midway where they visit some students) and "Intelligent Design." People--some of them very young--are out there just playing with genes to create what I guess must be new life forms. None of them seems to have ever heard of the law of unintended consequences.

AMDG

I think it's to distinguish the study of mountains, rivers and glaciers from "human geography", which is about things like towns and agriculture and other human uses and modifications.

By the way, the Asterix thing you linked to is funny. There's also The Journal of Irreproducible Results, which began way back in 1955.