Not long after the world achieved its warmest July ever on record, Iceland lost its first glacier to climate change. Scientists warn that hundreds of other ice sheets on the subarctic island risk the same fate in the coming years.
In efforts to bring attention to the effects of global warming, the nation held a funeral for the once huge Okjökull glacier and commemorated it with a bronze plaque that warns action is needed to prevent climate change. The ceremony took place then the plaque was mounted on a bare rock, on the barren terrain once covered by the Okjökull glacier, in western Iceland. The message on the plaque is intended to raise awareness about the decline of glaciers and the effects of climate change.
Around 100 people walked up the mountain to attend the ceremony, including Iceland’s prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the former UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson, and local researchers and colleagues from the United States who pioneered the commemoration project.
Jakobsdóttir said:
I hope this ceremony will be an inspiration not only to us here in Iceland but also for the rest of the world, because what we are seeing here is just one face of the climate crisis.
The plaque bears the inscription “A letter to the future” and it reads:
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.
It is also labeled “415 ppm CO2”, which was the record level of carbon dioxide measured in the atmosphere last May.
Julien Weiss, an aerodynamics professor at the University of Berlin who attended the ceremony with his wife and seven-year-old daughter, admitted that:
Seeing a glacier disappear is something you can feel, you can understand it and it’s pretty visual. You don’t feel climate change daily, it’s something that happens very slowly on a human scale, but very quickly on a geological scale.
Cymene Howe, associate professor of anthropology at Rice University in Texas, said the plaque is “the first monument to a glacier lost to climate change anywhere in the world”. She explained how Iceland loses 11 billion tons of ice per year, and scientists fear all of the island’s 400-plus glaciers will be gone by 2200. Since glaciers cover about 11% of the country’s surface, it is important people understand the consequences of their actions, and hopefully, by writing it out on a plaque for the world to see, they’ll all remember.
Howe said:
By memorializing a fallen glacier, we want to emphasize what is being lost – or dying – the world over, and also draw attention to the fact that this is something that humans have ‘accomplished’, although it is not something we should be proud of.
The Okjökull glacier ice covered 16sq km (6.2 square miles) back in 1890. By 2012 it measured just 0.7sq km, according to a report from the University of Iceland and by 2014 glaciologists stripped it of its glacier status. “We made the decision that this was no longer a living glacier, it was only dead ice, it was not moving”, Oddur Sigurðsson, a glaciologist with the Icelandic Meteorological Office, told AFP.
The glaciers of Iceland seemed eternal yet now a country mourns their loss.
