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The first of Iceland’s 400 glaciers to be lost to the
climate crisis will be remembered with a memorial plaque – and a sombre warning
for the future – to be unveiled by scientists and local people next month.
The glaciers of Iceland seemed eternal. Now a country mourns their loss
Andri Snær Magnason
My grandparents mapped these giants of the landscape. A
plaque will mark the spot where the first was lost to the climate crisis
Wed 14 Aug 2019 07.00 BST Last modified on Wed 14 Aug 2019
07.13 BST
Aerial photographs show the melting of the Ok glacier in
Iceland, from September 1986 to the beginning of August this year. Photograph: Nasa Earth Observatory/EPA
How do you write
a eulogy for a glacier? Think about it. How would you go about that, having grown
up with glaciers as a geological given, a symbol of eternity? How do you say
goodbye?
When academics at
Rice University in Houston, Texas called and asked me to write the text for a
plaque to commemorate the first dead glacier in Iceland, I found myself
confronted with this problem. I was reminded of one of my favourite
passages from Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five:
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing
anti-war books?”
“No. What do you
say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, ‘Why
don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’”
What he meant, of
course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as
glaciers. I believe that too.
Well guess what, Harrison Starr. We humans have done for the
glaciers. Almost every glacier on the planet has stopped growing and most are
shrinking at an alarming rate. Ok Glacier is the first in Iceland to be
formally declared dead ice. In the Himalayas, Greenland, the Alps and Iceland,
the glaciers are all melting. In the spirit of Vonnegut, you could say that the
Texan professors had asked me to write a pro-glacier text.
The name of our dead glacier has multiple layers. Ok in
Icelandic is the equivalent of “yoke” in English, the pole traditionally used
to carry buckets of water. Yoke can also mean burden, something that weighs you
down. Ok carried water in the form of ice. And now that water has become ocean,
the slowly rising burden of future generations.
According to current trends, all glaciers in Iceland will
disappear in the next 200 years. So the plaque for Ok could be the first of 400
in Iceland alone. The glacier Snæfellsjökull, where Jules Verne began his
Journey to the Centre of the Earth, is likely to be gone in the next 30 years
and that will be a significant loss. This glacier is for Iceland what Fuji is
for Japan.
The combined disappearance of all the glaciers of Iceland
will add about 1cm to global sea levels. It might not seem much, but when that
process is replicated worldwide, the floods will affect hundreds of millions of
people. The most worrying prospect of all is the melting of the Himalayan
glaciers. They are the yoke that carries the water for one billion people.
My family has a
personal connection to glaciers. My grandparents were founding partners
of the Icelandic glacial research society. When my grandfather said he wanted
to take my grandmother with him on a three-week research trip in 1955, some men
asked him if he was crazy. Take a woman on a glacier trip? My grandparents and
the research team mapped and measured the glacier and were stuck in a small
tent for three days. “Weren’t you cold?” I asked them. “Cold? We were just
married,” they replied. The part of the glacier where they pitched their tent
had no name at the time. Today it is called Brúðarbunga, “The Bride’s Bulge”.
For now, about 10% of Iceland is covered with glaciers. The
thickest packs are in Vatnajökull – up to 1,000 metres deep. Imagine stacking
three Empire State Buildings on top of each other – then stretch that bulk over
the horizon. To think that something so huge is actually fragile is beyond
comprehension. When my grandparents measured the glaciers, they were the
eternal white giants. But calculate how long they will last in this warming
climate and the outlook is bleak, to say the least. Most of them will only last
the lifespan of someone born today who lives to a good age. We understand that
glaciers grow and recede, but this is a collapse, an explosion in slow motion.
It’s not that we aren’t used to changes in nature: we have
mountains in Iceland younger than myself, huge craters that are younger than
the Brooklyn Bridge. We have volcanic eruptions so violent and powerful that
they seem to render all human action puny by comparison.
What do we humans matter, people ask, when a volcano might
blow and spew out millions of tonnes of CO2? In 2010 the famous
Eyjafjallajökull eruption closed down all airports in Europe. But its CO2 emissions were only about 150,000
tonnes a day, compared with human activity which is responsible for almost 100m
tonnes a day. The impact of humans on a daily basis is equal to more
than 600 of these volcanoes. Imagine all these eruptions on every continent,
all day, all night, all year round and tell yourself that they have no effect
on the climate.
The natural world is being transformed at an alarming rate.
The frozen graves of mammoths in Siberia are thawing and the rate of ocean
acidification is reaching levels not seen for 50m years. A dying glacier is not
a dramatic event. The drama of a melting glacier is no more dramatic than
springtime: one day there is snow and the next day it is gone. We are living
through the Great Thaw, the Big Melt. We have to remind ourselves that this is
not normal. That it is not OK to write a memorial to a glacier named Ok. We
remind ourselves with a plaque that we resemble the frogs which are slowly
boiled alive in the fable. Fellow frogs, we are cooking: what are we going to
do about it?
One of the fundamental flaws of our civilisation is its
inability to think outside the present. When a scientist talks about 2100, we
feel the date has nothing to do with us. So sometimes when I talk to university students I ask them to do a simple
calculation, a thought experiment. I tell them, if you were born in the
year 2000 you might become a healthy 90-year-old. At that time you might have a
favourite 20-year-old in your life. A grandchild perhaps, someone you have known
and loved for 20 years. When will that person be a healthy 90-year-old, maybe
talking about you as the greatest influence in their lives?
The students do the maths and come up with a year like 2160.
That is not an abstract calculation. That is the intimate time of someone in
high school or at university today. This is time whose meaning they can touch
with their bare hands. If we can connect deeply to a date like this, what do we
think of scientists warning of catastrophe in 2070? Or 2090? How can that be
beyond our imagination, as if part of some sci-fi future?
So on the copper plate to commemorate Ok glacier, we have
written to these loved ones of the future: “We know what is happening and what
needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
• Andri Snær Magnason is the Icelandic author of LoveStar,
The Casket of Time and The Story of the Blue Planet
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