Obituary: Okjökull was declared dead in 2014

IT WAS NOT the smallest glacier around, nor the most remote. You could see it from outlying parts of Reykjavík, Iceland’s capital, and from a long section of the country’s ring road. Nor was it striking. It had none of the beauty of its neighbour Snæfellsjökull, draping the perfect volcanic cone where Jules Verne found the tunnel that led to the centre of the Earth, nor the unearthly blueness of Svínafellsjökull, which played a background in “Game of Thrones”. Among 300 or so other glaciers sprawling across Iceland, covering 11% of the land surface, it was easily ignored. It sat low above the valley it had helped hollow out, a white cloak across the flattened peak of a shield volcano called Ok. From this it drew its full name, Okjökull, “the yoke glacier”. It remained “Ok” for short.

The writers of the Icelandic sagas noticed Ok only once, when a man crossing Iceland on horseback passed it by. The mountain was compared back then, when the sky was “the dwarf’s helmet” and the earth “Odin’s bride”, to a dead female troll lying on her back. The snow, only starting then to compact into Okjökull, was the whiteness of her breast. How she came to be lying there was a mystery; the story had disappeared. An odd image and an odder name, which made Icelanders laugh—if they had heard of Ok at all.

The strange name also meant “burden” as if the glacier were a burden or yoke the dead volcano carried. If so, the burden grew, its weight and depth increasing over the centuries with every season’s snow. At 40 or 50 metres deep, its ice layered as densely as tree rings under the microscope, it became a river, dynamic and alive, like the frozen rivers in Norse cosmology that had made the world in the beginning. It began to crawl slowly down the mountain, covering perhaps half a metre a year, carrying rocks in its belly that scarred the bedrock deep as it descended. It grew toes and arms. Though Ok was never big enough to have a proper gouging snout, it nonetheless did its small bit to carve out Iceland, a country where every feature of the landscape had history, and a tale, embedded in it. It stood as witness to that history, too.

At times it was a frightening companion. In spells of warmer weather its deepest meltwater, thickened to milky white with eroded bedrock, flooded and silted farmland. After the hardest winters it would swallow up sheep pastures. To walk on it was to risk immurement in crevasses cracked open for hundreds of metres down through blue and bluer ice. Yet it was also a regular friend. At evening, its western side glowed red to signal fine weather. When spring arrived, people thought the glacier announced it with a different smell. Some imagined its voice, stern and deep, leaving “chatter” in rough striations on the rocks.

It also held the water that fed local streams and sustained the local population, pouring it out as if from buckets balanced on the yoke of the mountain. Its water was very cold, very old, and pure. Icelanders might overlook Ok, but those who had drunk its water remembered with pleasure how it tasted, and imagined the little glacier would always go on giving.

In 1890 geologists estimated that Ok covered 1,600 hectares, or 6.2 square miles. (On one map of 1901 it seemed to spread even farther, to 3,800 hectares.) Gradually and quietly, through the 20th century, it dwindled away. In 1945, it covered only 500 hectares; in 1978, 300; in 2012, about 70. The next year Oddur Sigurðsson, a glacier expert at the Meteorological Office, paid his “good friend” a close visit. What he found was, by then, obvious: the snow on Ok was melting faster than it could be replaced. The ice had become so thin that “he” was no longer moving. Mr Sigurðsson later recorded the death on an official certificate, attributing it to “excessive summer heat caused by humans”.

Not many of those humans seemed to notice, in Iceland or elsewhere. Ok had never drawn the tourists and the snowmobilers. So as it shrank yet more, to a patchy snowfield and a crater lake, there was no general outcry. It took Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe, two anthropologists from Rice University in glacier-free Texas, to raise the alarm with a documentary film, “Not Ok”, in 2018. That drew writers, politicians and schoolchildren to a memorial gathering on Ok this August for the glistening white-and-blue cloak of ice that was no longer there.

Around 100 people attended, including Iceland’s prime minister, clambering for two hours over a landscape of black and brown rocks that now resembled the surface of the Moon. Though it was late summer, they wore parkas and ski-hats, and needed them in the freezing gusts. A high-school pupil read a poem to “Ok, the burdened glacier/which at last had had enough/of acts of terror from men who do not know/how to have both profits and morals”. More children pressed a bronze plaque into a round boulder. This “Letter to the Future” recorded the death of Ok, noted that all Iceland’s glaciers might follow in the next 200 years, and declared: “We know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” The last part of the inscription was “415ppm CO₂”, the record level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that was recorded in May. It stood as a monument to what human beings had done.

On their way down the mountain, several mourners broke off pieces of stray ice that clung in garlands to the rocks. They sucked them in the hope of tasting Okjökull for the last time. But it was only the dregs of winter snows, too fast disappearing. ■