User:Gochicago091899/Okjökull

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Okjökull (, Ok glacier) was a glacier in western Iceland on top of the shield volcano Ok.

Ok is located northeast of Reykjavík. The glacier was declared dead in 2014 by glaciologist Oddur Sigurðsson. In 2018, anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer of Rice University filmed a documentary about its loss, Not Ok, and proposed a commemorative plaque. The plaque was installed on August 18, 2019, with an inscription written by Andri Snær Magnason, titled "A letter to the future", in Icelandic and English. The English version reads: A letter to the future

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. At the end is the global atmospheric carbon dioxide reading for that month: 415 ppm. The ceremony was attended by Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the Prime Minister of Iceland; Guðmundur Ingi Guðbrandsson, the Environment Minister; and Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland. The placement of the plaque is intended to raise awareness of the decline of Iceland's glaciers due to global warming. Prior to the ceremony, NASA Earth Observatory tweeted images of Okjökull in 1986 and 2019.

The Okjökull memorial plaque can be found at the coordinates, N 64°35.498' W 020°52.253' at an elevation of 1,114 meters.

Name Change
Geologists estimate that Okjokull covered about 6 square miles in the late 1800s, but slowly shrunk until it officially lost its glacier status in 2014. When it "died", the 800 year old glacier's name was changed from Okjokull to Ok. “Jokull” means glacier in Icelandic, so this suffix was removed accordingly. Okjokull was pronounced dead in part due to its decrease in area, but also due to its inability to flow; a body of ice must be able to move to be defined as a glacier.

Funeral
A documentary called “Not Ok” was published by Rice University anthropologists four years after its death in 2018. This documentary brought publicity to Iceland’s first climate change-induced glacier death. In 2019, roughly one hundred people held a funeral for Okjokull; Iceland’s prime minister, Katrin Jakobsdottir, was among the attendees.

At the funeral, one high school student read a poem and a commemorative plaque, titled "A letter to the future," was placed on a boulder. This plaque is the only one commemorating a glacier lost to climate change. The plaque warned future readers that all of Iceland's glaciers would soon "follow the same path" as Okjokull. Iceland's glacial mass is predicted to shrink by a third by 2100.