How to Mourn a Glacier

In Iceland, a memorial ceremony suggests new ways to think about

climate change.
Video by Josh Okun

Along the western edge of Iceland’s central-highland plateau, in the far

east of the Borgarfjörður district, the Kaldidalur, or “cold valley,” stretches
twenty- ve miles between two barren volcanic ridges: the Prestahnúkur
system to the east and the Ok volcano to the west. These volcanoes form
part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the longest mountain range in the world,
which runs under the ocean from Antarctica to the Arctic and into the
Siberian Sea. On the valley’s eastern slope, massive glaciers push dolerite
boulders down the mountainsides with their shining blue snouts. The
western slope rises slowly toward the summit of Ok, a low shield volcano
shrouded in mist.

Although nearly every mountain, stream, and valley in Iceland has a name
and a history, Ok isn’t particularly famous. No path brings tourists to its
summit, and those who travel the one-lane gravel road through the valley
oor typically take no note of Okjökull—meaning “Ok’s glacier”—which
spanned sixteen square kilometres at its largest, at the end of the
nineteenth century. By 1978, it had shrunk to three square kilometres. In
2014, Iceland’s leading glaciologist, Oddur Sigurðsson, hiked to Ok’s
summit to discover only a small patch of slushy gray ice in the shadow of
the volcano’s crater. Okjökull could no longer be classi ed as a glacier,
Sigurðsson announced to the scienti c community. It had become “dead
ice.”

In August, I joined about a hundred scientists, activists, dignitaries,

farmers, politicians, journalists, and children, as they gathered at the base
of Ok to mourn the lost glacier. The day began cold and gray; a cover of
low clouds threatened rain. “The climate crisis is already here,” Iceland’s
Prime Minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, told the crowd. “It is not just this
glacier that has disappeared. We see the heat waves in Europe. We see
oods. We see droughts.” Film crews pointed their cameras, while the wind
whipped Jakobsdóttir’s hair and the paper on which she had written her
remarks. “The time has come not for words, not necessarily for
declarations, but for action,” she said.

Her message was echoed by Mary Robinson, the former President of

Ireland and former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and by
Kumi Nadoo, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, who assured
us that the planet would be ne. But, if we sustain our current trajectory,
he continued, humans would be gone. Nadoo passed the microphone to
the writer and former Icelandic Presidential candidate Andri Snær
Magnason, who gripped it with both gloved hands. “Some of the students
who are here today are twenty years old,” he said, his voice shaking. “You
may live to be a healthy ninety-year-old, and at that time you might have a
favorite young person—a great-grandchild, maybe—who is the age you are
now. When that person is a healthy ninety-year-old, the year will be 2160,
and this event today will be in the order of direct memory from you to your
grandchild in the future.”

Magnason, who wore black glasses, a black stocking cap, and waterproof
pants, had written the text for a memorial plaque that was to be installed
at the top of the volcano, at the site of the former glacier. Like his speech,
the plaque was meant, he said, to connect us to “the intimate time of the
future.” He asked us to turn toward the mountain. I followed the crowd
away from the road and up Ok’s slope. Behind us, the volcanoes darkened
with rain.

The area where Ok Glacier once was. The landscape is desolate, with rocks that are
reminiscent of a large lakebed.Photograph by Josh Okun

Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, and Magnús Örn Sigurðsson brave the elements to
hike to the summit of Ok mountain and drill holes for the plaque.Photograph by
Josh Okun
When Sigurðsson rst announced Okjökull’s death, it was reported with
little fanfare. A brief program aired on public television, and one short,
four-line story appeared in an English-language newspaper. Around that
time, two American anthropologists, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer—
my colleagues at Rice University—began conducting eld work on the
social impacts of the climate crisis in Iceland. The story about the death of
Okjökull caught their attention, they told me, because Ok (pronounced
“auk”) “was not O.K.” Photographs of the melting ice cap showed the
caldera in the shape of an “O”; inside the crater, a black rock jutting from
the ice, looked like a “C”. One Icelander they spoke to pointed out that “Oc”
is the spelling of Ok in medieval Icelandic. The mountain, they said, seemed
to be writing its own name.

Howe and Boyer began making a documentary about the glacier. Working
with a team of Icelanders, they lmed interviews with farmers and artists
who lived near the volcano, and with scientists, politicians, folklorists,
writers, professors, tourists, and religious leaders. When asked how they
felt about the death of Okjökull, some people shrugged and said that they
were sad. Others admitted that they were hearing its name for the rst
time. Sigurðsson, the glaciologist, insisted to Howe and Boyer that, even
though Okjökull was the smallest named glacier in Iceland, its death was a
major loss. “It should not feel like just brushing something off your coat,”
he told them. Children learn the name of Okjökull in their earliest
geography lessons; they see its name printed on nearly every Icelandic
map. “A good friend has left us,” Sigurðsson said.

After the documentary premièred, in 2018, Howe and Boyer sought a

sense of closure. They settled on the idea of installing the memorial plaque
and asked Magnason to write the text. It was a di cult prompt,
Magnason told me: only a handful of people might ever climb the
mountain, and fewer still would happen to stumble across the plaque. The
other challenge was how to evoke, in words, the linkage between glaciers
and memory. “The oldest Icelandic texts are a thousand years old,”
Magnason said—around the same age as the ice in the country’s oldest
glaciers. “In all that time, the Earth has been quite stable, but the Earth will
have changed more in the next two hundred years than in the last
thousand years.” The plaque, cast in copper, would need to cohere for a
reader two centuries from now, he explained, while also enshrining a
speci c moment of urgency.

Video From The New Yorker

Magnason decided to address his imagined audience directly. “A letter to
the future,” the plaque reads in both Icelandic and English. “Ok is the rst
Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our
glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to
acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be
done. Only you know if we did it.” As Howe, Boyer, and Magnason planned
the ceremony, the rst public photographs of the plaque were released
and went viral. Soon, they began hearing from people all over Europe, Asia,
and North America—scientists, journalists, even the Prime Minister of
Iceland—who wanted to be part of the funeral for the dead glacier at the
top of the world.

If we say something has died, can we also say it once lived? A few days
before the memorial ceremony for Okjökull, I met Sigurðsson for coffee on
an uncommonly sunny morning in Reykjavík, hoping to learn more about
why he had chosen to frame the loss of the glacier as a death. For a
glaciologist, Sigurðsson has amassed an unusual degree of celebrity. His
phone rang several times as we talked, and he admitted that he was not
used to the attention. He was looking forward to a trip with his wife, the
next week, to celebrate their anniversary.

Sigurðsson brightened when I asked him about glaciers. “They are

enormously interesting as a natural phenomenon,” he said. Partly his
passion was aesthetic—“They just shine,” he said—but he was also
interested in why they surge suddenly and without explanation. When I
asked him directly if glaciers were living, he hesitated. Things that grow
and move, we tend to consider animate, he said, even if we resist the idea
that every animate thing has a soul. A healthy glacier grows each winter
more than it melts each summer; moves on the ground under its own
weight; and is at least partially covered with a thick, fur-like layer of snow.
Glaciers also move on their insides, especially in Iceland, where the glaciers
are made of temperate ice, which exists right at the melting point. This
sets them apart from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which are
frozen and older by hundreds of thousands of years.

In Iceland, Sigurðsson said, the oldest ice was born more than a thousand
years ago, before the Little Ice Age, on the north side of Vatnajökull, the
largest glacier in the country. Vatnajökull is roughly the area of Delaware
and Rhode Island combined, and stands almost as tall as the Empire State
Building. Okjökull, by comparison, was small and young when it died; ice
covered the mountaintop for only a few centuries. Sigurðsson knows this
because he had counted the glacier’s rings, which were formed by dust
each year—not unlike the rings on a tree. The rings contained a sort of
memory—a record of pollen clouds, volcanic eruptions, world wars, and
nuclear meltdowns. When a glacier melts, Sigurðsson explained, its
memory disappears.

Having “memory” is just one of the many ways scientists refer to glaciers
in terms that make them seem alive. They also “crawl” and have “toes”;
when they break off at the ablation edge, they are said to have “calved.”
They are born and die—the latter at increasing rates, especially during “the
great thaw” of the past twenty years. When Sigurðsson conducted a
glacier inventory in the early two-thousands, he found more than three
hundred glaciers in Iceland; a repeat inventory, in 2017, revealed that fty-
six had disappeared. Many of them were small glaciers in the highlands,
which had spent their lives almost entirely unseen. “Most of them didn’t
even have names,” he told me. “But we have been working with local
people to name every glacier so that they will not go unbaptized.” Now, he
intends to complete their death certi cates and bring a stack of them to
meetings. The next to go, he thinks, will be Hofsjökull, to the east.

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It is unusual for a glaciologist to ll out a death certi cate, but something
concrete, like a piece of paper or a plaque, helps to make clear that the loss
is irreversible. The last ice age began in the Pleistocene and ended ten
thousand years ago, when Iceland was covered in a massive ice sheet
thousands of feet thick. The planet has warmed, cooled, and warmed
again since then; ice has advanced and retreated, and this movement has
carved the mountains and valleys that we claim as our own. But, in the
past several years alone, we have witnessed not only an acceleration of
the great thaw but also the sudden bleaching of the coral reefs, the rapid
spread of the Sahara desert, continuous sea-level rise, the warming of the
oceans, and record-breaking hurricanes each season and every year. This
is one of the most distressing things about being alive today: we are
witnessing geologic time collapse on a human scale.

The crowd moments after the plaque-placement ceremony. The monument is within
a few hundred feet of the remaining glacial ice, and is the largest rock in the
area.Photograph by Josh Okun

A rare ground rainbow in the Kaldidalur.Photograph by Josh Okun

Climbing Ok, we scrambled for hours over dolerite boulders, pitted lava
rocks, patches of thick moss, and the small streams that trickled down the
volcano to the lake below. We paused for lunch before the nal leg of the
hike, and Magnason instructed us to approach the caldera with reverence
and humility. Elsewhere in Iceland, he explained, climbing to the summit of
a mountain in silence and without looking back is said to grant the hiker
three wishes. Wishes are sometimes too grand to be of use, Howe added,
but it can be useful to imagine the future we hope to see.

As we walked the last few hundred feet, I realized that we lack metaphors
for comprehending the future, much less the scale of the disaster that it
has in store for us. Then the mountainside levelled, and the sight of the
crater purged all thoughts from my head. The ice was gray, lifeless,
uncanny. Guðmundur Ingi Guðbrandsson, Iceland’s Minister of the
Environment, stood on the boulder that had been chosen as the site of the
memorial. Children surrounded him with protest signs, demanding that
their political leaders, their parents, and their teachers do more. “When I
grew up as a little boy not very far away from here, my grandmother
taught me the names of all the mountains we could see on the horizon,
and the names of the four glaciers,” Guðbrandsson said. “When I visit my
parents today on their farm, I can see only three.” The wind chill had
dropped below freezing, and the crowd huddled together for warmth.
Sigurðsson read a list of vital statistics from Okjökull’s death certi cate.
“The age of this glacier was about three hundred years,” he said. “Its death
was caused by excessive summer heat. Nothing was done to save it.”

Howe and Boyer asked the children to come to the front of the crowd. “We
need to understand our relationship to the world in ways we haven’t had
to in the past,” Howe said. “We need to be able to imagine a new future.”
There was a moment of silence as the children pushed the plaque into
place. The day had cleared a little, and I could see across the Kaldidalur to
the glaciers on the opposite peaks. Below them, in the valley’s deepest
crevice, a meltwater lake was forming, already so blue and deep.