THE LOST GLACIER...AND WHY IT MATTERS TO US ALL
PAYING your respects to Ok is not for the faint-hearted. Finding it is even tougher.
It took a two-hour drive out of Reykjavik, much of it along narrow gravel tracks through glaciercapped mountains before we parked up and began the climb.
Ok is a gently sloping rounded old volcano about 40 miles northeast of the capital, but there are no signposts and no path.
Without our guide Stefan we’d never have even found the right mountain, never mind Ok’s summit.
With every step you have to climb over rocks and boulders or areas cobbled with glacial stones.
Along the way you pass tiny, beautiful mountain flowers such as wild thyme and sea thrift, somehow clinging on to produce pinpricks of blue, white, purple and red.
At the summit of this mountain, not far south of the Arctic Circle, you have to keep a close eye on the weather. Fog and cloud can close within minutes, turning a beautiful environment into a death trap.
Once we got to the top it took us an hour of staggering round the long, domed summit, using compasses and maps on our phones, before we finally found remnants of the departed glacier.
It feels incredibly poignant to see an expanse of brown rock where once there was a wall of ice. It felt entirely appropriate to lay flowers at the memorial plaque.
Then the tough part – getting down. Without walking sticks to help protect my arthritic ankles and knees I think I’d still be up there.
But it was worth it, and seemed only right to suffer to be a witness to how man is changing our planet.
THE Daily Express can confirm that time is running out in the battle to reverse climate change. We sent a team to the global warming frontline – the vanishing glaciers of Iceland – as the UN prepares to release its latest update on the situation next week. We went to the first Icelandic glacier to be formally declared dead, finding its remnants with great difficulty. As in the world’s other polar regions, the glaciers are not just retreating but getting thinner. This poses problems for the whole planet, with some climate models predicting a 3ft-rise in sea levels by the end of the century, threatening coastal communities worldwide.
ALL is not OK at the glacier known as Ok, as we discovered after slogging to the top of its mountain.
This ancient river of ice is no longer there. It has melted away, virtually to nothing.
In fact, it took us an hour of desperate roaming around the vast expanse of boulders at the summit to find Ok’s remnants.
All that was left were patches of snow barely bigger than a few football pitches and a blue lake in the crater of a long dormant volcano.
Ok, pronounced Ork, is the first Icelandic glacier to be officially pronounced dead, another victim of climate change. Incredibly, Icelandic experts believe the rest of the country’s glaciers could disappear in the next 150 years.
In 1890 Ok covered four square miles, a moving wall of ice lurking nearly 4,000ft up in the brooding mountains northeast of Reykjavik.
By 1945 it had shrunk to about three sq miles, according to a study led by Icelandic Met Office glaciologist Hrafnhildur Hannesdóttir.
In 1975 when it covered just two sq miles, its decline was speeding up. By 2014 the last rites were performed because it could no longer move under its own weight.
In 2019 it covered 0.02 sq miles – barely one per cent of its peak.
Ok is thought to have begun forming 5,000 years ago. After probably shrinking during a warm period when the Vikings arrived, it was a prominent part of Iceland’s landscape for around 700 years.
Today, where there was once creaking, groaning blue ice sprinkled with black volcanic ash, there is just a vast expanse of brown, dry boulders – now freed from the icefield’s eternal grip.
According to Dr Hannesdóttir, Ok is not alone. Writing in Jökull (Icelandic for glacier), she wrote that since 1890: “The larger ice caps have lost 10–30 per cent of their maximum area, whereas intermediate-size glaciers have been reduced by up to 80 per cent. During the first two decades of the 21st century … tens of small glaciers have disappeared entirely.” Ok is just another sign of the relentless march of climate change, with polar regions warming nearly three times as fast as the global average.
In Iceland, says Halldör Björnsson of the IMO, the country’s longest bridge was made redundant a few years ago when a glacier retreated and a river changed course.
Extreme weather events are also becoming more common. Last December record rainfall caused landslides in the east of Iceland, destroying 10 houses. Thankfully no one was hurt.
Seydisfjördur got 22.4 inches of rain in five days compared to Reykjavik’s annual average of 34 inches. It was followed earlier this year by southwest Iceland’s worst drought in 26 years.
The loss of Ok was seen as so symbolic of climate change that American anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer won global headlines in 2019 when they installed a plaque on bare rock by the last remains of snow and ice to commemorate its passing.
Its message, in Icelandic and English, is described as “A letter to the Future”. As world leaders prepare to gather for crunch climate talks in Glasgow in November, this message could not be more pressing.
It is a shame that each one of them cannot make the demanding trek to see it – or, in reality, not see it – for themselves.
The plaque declares: “Ok is the first 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.” The
plaque records that in August 2019 the average concentration of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, was 415 parts per million. Despite the travel restrictions of the pandemic, it is now around 419 ppm.
Photographer Jonathan Buckmaster and I were joined at the plaque by Cymene and Dominic, both academics at Rice University in Houston, Texas, on their first trip back since the plaque’s unveiling two years ago.
Cymene, 52, said: “We wanted a sense of closure for this glacier that had died with little fanfare. It was like the world shrugged its shoulders.
“So many of the signs of climate change are abstract or difficult for people to understand. But this memorial is a very human way to help people get it.”
Dominic added: “The biggest problem with climate change is that people get numbed by its scale. But the loss of Ok and this memorial are saying we need to take it seriously. Icelanders didn’t put the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Houston, where we’re based, did.”
At the Icelandic Met Office there is no doubt about the impact of climate change on glaciers, which cover 10 per cent of the country. Its latest review said an area more than five times the size of the Isle of Wight has been lost to glacial retreat in 120 years.
The retreat has accelerated, with 36 per cent of the overall loss in the past 20 years.
Ok is likely to be just the first of many Icelandic glaciers to melt away. Climate change means Iceland may soon be looking for a new name.All is not OK.
● John and Jonathan carbon offset the greenhouse gases from their return flights to Iceland with C Level Earth – clevel.co.uk