‘He is only dead ice.’ That’s how glaciologist Oddur Sigurdsson described the glacier Ok when he found it was no longer moving under its own weight. A funeral followed, marking its demise with an epitaph that was also a warning for the future. ‘This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.’ Glaciers everywhere are dying.

Glacial endlings seem to mark the convergence of human time and geological time, as Andri Snær Magnason writes, an age when the endings of great non-human forces can happen in the span of a human lifetime. But perhaps too the charismatic temporality of the melting glaciers, our dramatic grief for their end, is misleading. Maybe the funeral of the glacier turns us away from the slower forces at work. Maybe it makes us feel we are out of time and that the end has already happened when there are still things we can do. Maybe it makes us feel that climate change is a thing that happens only in wild or remote places. Or maybe by giving the glaciers a voice, a life and a death we can bring home the significance of the demise of these ice giants and halt their decline.  

For now, though, the glaciers continue to melt, as have the tombstones. On the Seltjarnarnes peninsula near Reykjavík a graveyard of ice tombstones was recently erected, markers which will dissolve into water just like their namesakes, envisaged as a way of making real and understandable the death of glaciers. Temporary though these headstones are, they are a form of memorialising what may be lost, and the frozen cemetery accompanied the launch of an online Glacier Casualty List.

Yet the grief for the glaciers is also underpinned by financial and economic considerations. Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann photographed and filmed a Swiss glacier, the Rhône Glacier, that had been covered in a shroud by local entrepreneurs. But this deathly cloak was not an artistic installation. The thermal blanket for the ice-river reflected heat from the sun and kept the glacier alive so that tourists would keep paying to enter the cold grotto of its interior.

In this chapter, I explore what it means for a non-human other like a glacier to go extinct, what it means to us, how we mark that passing, and what we hope to communicate in the performance of grief and loss. The glacier has become a touchstone for imagining the impact of climate change, with repeat photographs of shrinking and changing glaciers dating back over a hundred years. For all the critiques that surround the narrative of glacial death, it is one that impels people to care about endings engineered by the Anthropocene.