Human Activity in Glacial Landscapes

Spec mapping (AQA 7037): Paper 1, §3.1.4 Glacial Systems and Landscapes — human impacts and management of cold environments / glaciated uplands; the value of these environments; the threats and opportunities; sustainable approaches to management. This lesson applies the physical landscape (the whole of §3.1.4) to the human use, conflict and management dimension, linking strongly to §3.2 Global Systems / Changing Places / resource and tourism geography and to §3.1.5 Hazards (avalanche, rockfall from permafrost thaw). The assessment objectives are AO1 (opportunities, conflicts and management strategies), AO2 (applying the fragility and value of glaciated environments to assess sustainability) and AO3 (interpreting visitor, economic and environmental data).

Glaciated and formerly glaciated uplands are not empty wilderness — they are working landscapes that support millions of people through tourism, farming, energy, water supply and quarrying, and the landforms studied throughout this option are the very things that make them economically valuable. But they are also fragile: thin soils, short growing seasons, slow-recovering vegetation and (in active glacial areas) genuine physical hazard. The result is a landscape of opportunities and conflicts in which different stakeholders compete, and where the central A-Level question is whether current management is sustainable — economically, environmentally and socially.

A useful starting concept is the value of these environments, which is multi-dimensional. They have economic value (tourism revenue, HEP, water supply, farming, minerals); environmental/ecological value (distinctive habitats, rare species, carbon storage in peat and woodland, scientific interest); cultural and aesthetic value (landscapes that inspired the Romantic poets and now underpin national identity and World Heritage status); and scientific value (as records of past glaciation and as monitoring sites for climate change). Different stakeholders prioritise different values, which is the root of most conflicts: a developer sees economic opportunity, a conservationist sees ecological fragility, a resident sees a home and community, a visitor sees recreation. Recognising this plurality of values is the key to writing a balanced, evaluative answer — the question is rarely "is this landscape useful?" but "whose values should prevail, and how can competing values be reconciled sustainably?"

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Opportunities in Glacial Landscapes

Tourism and Recreation

Tourism is usually the dominant economic activity in glaciated uplands, exploiting the very landforms studied earlier in this option. The relationship is direct: the dramatic relief that draws walkers and climbers is glacially-sculpted (corries, arêtes, peaks); the lakes that draw boaters and sightseers are over-deepened glacial troughs; and the glaciers themselves are a tourist spectacle in actively glaciated areas. This is the clearest illustration in the whole specification of how physical processes underpin a human economy — the Ice Age is, quite literally, the foundation of the regional economy. The range of activities is wide:

Activity	Glacial feature exploited	Examples
Hiking & mountaineering	Dramatic relief — corries, arêtes, peaks	Lake District, Chamonix, Snowdonia
Water sports	Ribbon lakes, tarns	Windermere (sailing, kayaking), Lake Lucerne
Winter sports	Steep, snow-holding slopes	Chamonix, Zermatt, Verbier
Glacier sightseeing	Glaciers, troughs, waterfalls	Mer de Glace, Aletsch, Jungfraujoch
Dark-sky tourism	Remote, low-light-pollution valleys	Lake District (Ennerdale)

The Lake District attracts of the order of 15–19 million visitors a year; Cumbria Tourism figures put the visitor economy at roughly £1.5 billion per year, supporting on the order of tens of thousands of jobs — economically vital, but heavily seasonal and concentrated on a few honeypots. Tourism here exploits the glacial inheritance directly: the lakes are over-deepened glacial troughs, the dramatic walking is on glacially-sculpted fells, and the scenic valleys are glacial troughs. The landscape that draws the visitors is, quite literally, a product of the Ice Age — which is why physical and human geography are so tightly bound in this option. But this dependence is also a vulnerability: the economy relies on a single sector (tourism), which is seasonal, weather-dependent, and — in actively glaciated areas such as the Alps — threatened by the loss of the very glaciers tourists come to see.

Farming and Forestry

• Hill sheep farming dominates UK glaciated uplands — flat trough floors and lower slopes give rough grazing for hardy breeds (Herdwick in the Lake District, Swaledale in the Dales); the thin, acidic soils on glacially-scoured slopes are unsuitable for arable, so extensive pastoralism is the only viable farming
• Dairy farming on more fertile lowland till around the upland margins, where glacial deposits give better soils
• Forestry — conifer plantations (e.g., Grizedale, Whinlatter) on glacially-deposited soils in a wet, mild climate, providing timber and (increasingly) recreation
• In the Alps, transhumance moves dairy cattle to high alpine meadows in summer, underpinning the cheese economies and the open, flower-rich meadow landscapes that themselves attract tourists

Farming here is shaped directly by the glacial inheritance: the choice of land use reflects glacially-determined soils, slope and climate, so even agriculture is a downstream consequence of the Ice Age. It is also increasingly marginal economically, propped up by subsidies, which is why the future of upland farming — and the rewilding debate — is so contested.

Hydroelectric Power (HEP)

Glaciated relief is close to ideal for HEP — steep valleys give head, high orographic rainfall gives supply, and ribbon lakes give storage. Each of these conditions is a direct product of glaciation: the steep-sided, over-deepened troughs provide the vertical drop a turbine needs; the upland location forces moist air to rise and rain heavily (orographic precipitation); and the over-deepened rock basins of the ribbon lakes act as ready-made reservoirs. Glaciated uplands are therefore disproportionately important for hydroelectric generation, as the examples below show:

• Thirlmere and Haweswater (Lake District) are reservoirs supplying Manchester; the Thirlmere scheme (completed 1894) pipes water ~150 km — a striking example of a glacial trough being adapted as a strategic water resource, though the drowning of Thirlmere's valley was controversial at the time and remains a touchstone in debates about exploiting these landscapes
• Grande Dixence, Switzerland — at ~285 m one of the world's tallest gravity dams, harnessing Valais glacier meltwater to generate clean electricity
• Norway generates the great majority of its electricity from HEP, much of it in glacially-carved valleys and fjords, making glacial geomorphology central to its low-carbon energy system

Water supply and HEP illustrate a wider point: glaciated uplands are strategic resource zones whose value extends far beyond their own boundaries — Manchester depends on Lakeland water, much of Switzerland and Norway on Alpine and fjord HEP. This regional importance raises the stakes in any conflict over their management and is increasingly entangled with climate change, since the glacial meltwater that feeds many HEP schemes is itself declining as glaciers retreat (a forward link to the climate-change lesson's "water tower" concept).

Quarrying and Mining

• Slate — Honister Slate Mine (Lake District) has worked Borrowdale volcanic slate for centuries, exploiting a rock type laid down long before glaciation but exposed and shaped by it
• Granite — Shap Granite (eastern Lakes) for building stone and aggregate, the same distinctive rock that gives the famous erratic trains
• Copper and lead — historic metal mining at Coniston and elsewhere, now largely closed but surviving as heritage tourism and as a legacy of contamination
• Sand and gravel — fluvioglacial outwash deposits around the upland margins are quarried for aggregate

Quarrying illustrates a recurring tension: it provides relatively well-paid, year-round local employment (a contrast to seasonal tourism work) and supplies materials society needs, but it also creates noise, dust, heavy traffic and visual scarring in a protected landscape, and it is often opposed by conservationists and tourism interests. In a National Park, every extraction proposal becomes a test case for balancing the economic value of the resource against the environmental and aesthetic value of the landscape.

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Conflicts in Glacial Landscapes

Multiple uses of a fragile landscape inevitably generate conflicts between stakeholders (tourists, residents, farmers, conservation bodies, businesses, water companies, planning authorities). A conflict arises whenever two desirable uses cannot be fully reconciled in the same space — and in a compact, fragile, much-loved landscape such as a glaciated upland, such clashes are constant. The main axes of conflict are between economic exploitation and environmental conservation, between mass tourism and local communities, and between traditional land use (farming) and ecological restoration. Mapping who wins and who loses from each activity — and recognising that the same activity can benefit one stakeholder while harming another — is the key analytical skill these questions demand:

Tourism vs Environment

Issue	Description	Example
Footpath erosion	Trampling strips thin soils and vegetation, scarring slopes	Heavily-used routes (e.g., to Helvellyn) widen and gully; the National Trust spends large sums annually on repair
Traffic congestion	Narrow valley roads gridlock and car parks overflow	Borrowdale, Ambleside and Windermere congested at peak times
Water pollution	Sewage/nutrients from tourism infrastructure	Windermere has suffered algal blooms linked partly to treated-sewage discharges — a recent flashpoint
Visual impact	Car parks, lifts and proposals (zip wires/gondolas) intrude on scenery	Periodic controversy over adventure-tourism schemes in the Lakes
Wildlife disturbance	Recreation disturbs breeding birds and rare species	Ground-nesting birds and red squirrels in quieter valleys

Tourism vs Local Communities

• Second homes / holiday lets — in some honeypot villages a large share of housing is second homes or short-term lets, inflating prices beyond local incomes and hollowing out year-round communities; the rise of online short-let platforms has intensified this, converting long-term rental homes into tourist accommodation
• Seasonal, low-paid work — many tourism jobs are insecure, part-time and poorly paid, making it hard for young local people to build a life in the area
• Service loss — as the permanent, working-age population falls, schools, shops, post offices and bus routes close, eroding the viability of the very communities that give the landscape its lived character
• Demographic ageing — high house prices and limited jobs push out younger residents, leaving an ageing population and threatening the future of farming and local services

This is the conflict least amenable to management, because the market forces driving it (the desirability of the landscape itself) are exactly what the National Park exists to protect. Planning measures — affordable-housing quotas, local-occupancy clauses, restrictions on new second homes in some parishes — can slow but not reverse the trend, which is why the social pillar of sustainability is often the weakest in honeypot glaciated landscapes.

Farming vs Conservation (the rewilding debate)

• Decades of sheep overgrazing have suppressed woodland and degraded blanket bog, reducing biodiversity and worsening downstream flooding
• Farmers argue grazing maintains the open, "traditional" landscape visitors (and the World Heritage listing) value, and that hill farming (with hardy Herdwick sheep) is a cultural heritage in its own right
• Conservationists (Natural England, National Trust, RSPB) press for rewilding / reduced grazing to restore woodland, peat and natural flood management — pointing to projects such as Wild Ennerdale, where reduced intervention is allowing native woodland and a more natural river to return
• The 2015 Storm Desmond floods sharpened the debate: restoring upland woodland and peat (slowing runoff from the glacially-steepened catchments) is now promoted as natural flood management that could reduce flooding in Cumbrian towns downstream
• The shift in farm subsidies after Brexit (from area-based payments to Environmental Land Management / "public money for public goods") is reshaping the economics, potentially paying farmers to deliver carbon storage, biodiversity and flood mitigation rather than to maximise stocking

This conflict has no simple resolution because it pits genuinely competing values — cultural heritage and rural livelihoods against biodiversity, carbon and flood protection — and the "right" answer depends on which is prioritised. That irreducible value-conflict is exactly what makes it such fertile ground for evaluative exam questions.

Quarrying / Energy vs Conservation

• Quarrying brings jobs but noise, dust, lorry traffic and visual scars; Honister operates under tight National Park planning controls and combines working slate extraction with heritage tourism (mine tours, a "via ferrata"), an interesting attempt to reconcile extraction with conservation and tourism
• Reservoir schemes secure water/energy but drown valleys and alter river regimes (Thirlmere's history — the flooding of a valley to supply distant Manchester — remains a contested symbol of urban demands overriding local landscape)
• Even renewable energy can conflict with conservation in these protected landscapes: proposals for wind turbines or run-of-river hydro schemes pit climate-mitigation goals against landscape-protection goals, a tension that will only sharpen as decarbonisation accelerates

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Case Study: Chamonix–Mont-Blanc, French Alps (an active glacial landscape)

Chamonix (~9,000 residents) sits in the Arve valley beneath Mont Blanc (4,808 m) and is a premier mountain-tourism destination — but one on the front line of glacial change.

Opportunities: host of the first Winter Olympics (1924); major ski areas (Les Grands Montets, Brévent–Flégère, the off-piste Vallée Blanche); summer mountaineering, hiking, paragliding and biking drawing on the order of 2 million visitors a year; the Aiguille du Midi cable car (to ~3,842 m) and the Montenvers rack railway to the Mer de Glace.

Conflicts and challenges:

Challenge	Detail
Glacier retreat	The Mer de Glace has retreated ~2.5 km since 1850 and thinned by well over 100 m; the staircase to the ice cave lengthens yearly (now 500+ steps), directly threatening the tourism asset
Avalanche risk	The valley is avalanche-prone; the 1999 Montroc avalanche destroyed chalets and killed 12 people
Traffic & air quality	The Mont Blanc road tunnel funnels heavy HGV and tourist traffic through the valley, congesting it and degrading air quality
Permafrost thaw & rockfall	Thawing high-altitude permafrost is destabilising rock faces; the famous Drus pillar partially collapsed (notably in 2005); infrastructure such as the Aiguille du Midi station needs reinforcement
Habitat degradation	Lifts, pistes and snow-cannons damage fragile alpine ecosystems
Housing affordability	Tourism demand prices out local workers

Management: voluntary mountaineering codes on the Mont Blanc routes; electric shuttle services to cut valley traffic; continuous glacier and rockfall monitoring (Grenoble's glaciology laboratory; instrumented rock faces with alert systems); summer re-seeding of degraded pistes. Chamonix shows management adapting to a moving target — the resource itself is shrinking.