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?

Icelandic memorial warns future: ‘Only you know if we saved glaciers’ Read more

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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The plaque for the Ok glacier could be the first of 400 in Iceland alone.’ Photograph: Rice University

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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘My grandparents were founding partners of the Icelandic glacial research society; they went on a research trip together in 1955.’ Photograph: Andri Snær Magnason

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?

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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