RIP, Okjökull.
The first of Iceland’s glaciers to disappear due to climate change will be memorialized with a plaque, which will be unveiled next month.
“This will be the first monument to a glacier lost to climate change anywhere in the world,” said anthropologist Cymene Howe of Rice University in Houston in a statement. “By marking Ok’s passing, we hope to draw attention to what is being lost as Earth’s glaciers expire.”
(The English name of the glacier is “Ok glacier”)
“These bodies of ice are the largest freshwater reserves on the planet and frozen within them are histories of the atmosphere,” Howe said.
About 100 years ago, the glacier covered almost 6 square miles of a mountainside in western Iceland and measured 50 meters thick.
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The plaque on the glacier 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.”
The memorial will be officially unveiled during a ceremony in August.
“Ok was the first named Icelandic glacier to melt because of how humans have transformed the planet’s atmosphere,” said Dominic Boyer, another Rice University anthropologist. “Its fate will be shared by all of Iceland’s glaciers unless we act now to radically curtail greenhouse gas emissions.”
Rice University is involved because Howe and other anthropologists from the university produced the documentary “Not Ok” about the glacier in 2018.
The memorial also carries the words “415ppm CO2,” referring to the record-breaking level of 415 parts per million of carbon dioxide recorded in the atmosphere in May this year, the Guardian said.
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Carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas most responsible for global warming.
Howe and Boyer hope the memorial will raise awareness about the decline of Iceland’s glaciers, according to Rice University.
“One of our Icelandic colleagues put it very wisely when he said, ‘Memorials are not for the dead; they are for the living,’” Howe said. “With this memorial, we want to underscore that it is up to us, the living, to collectively respond to the rapid loss of glaciers and the ongoing impacts of climate change.
“For Ok glacier it is already too late; it is now what scientists call ‘dead ice.’”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Iceland glacier: Memorial planned for glacier lost to climate change