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The Icelandic Landscape Is Changing, and It’s Changing Us

The geology of Iceland has always been on the move. The island sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a long underwater mountain range that is also the boundary between two diverging tectonic plates, and eruptions are common, often leaving behind vast lava fields and ash layers. These changes can be deceiving. You can swim in Viti, a volcanic crater, or visit Lake Askja and feel like you are surrounded by something that is millions of years old, but both are younger than the Brooklyn Bridge.

Nature’s creativity has meant that the Icelandic language must also be nimble, and for centuries the language and landscape have been in dialogue. Nature makes something new, a mountain, a lava field, even a new island, which requires a name. The habit is often to say what we see — a tendency that can sound quite basic in translation. Eldfell mountain was formed in a volcanic eruption in 1973; its name means fire mountain. Other times we’re more poetic, like with Surtsey, a new island formed in 1963, which takes its name from the fire giant Surtur in Norse mythology.

Those names, in turn, influence the language. For example, the word “fuglabjarg,” Icelandic for “birdcliff,” is both a word and a metaphor. As a word, it is the name for a cliff where sea birds lay their nests. On one cliff you could have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of seabirds — guillemots, razorbills, puffins and gulls. Seabirds are no songbirds, and the screeching, screaming, yeeking and honking made these places one of the noisiest places in Iceland. That’s why in Icelandic, “fuglabjarg” can also be used to describe a loud gathering of people. As when I go to a large conference and send a text message to my wife: “This place is like a fuglabjarg.”

The trouble with getting used to a landscape that changes so quickly is that you can become blind to a new pace of change — one that is not normal. As the oceans warm and some of the food sources fail, on some of the fuglabjargs the nesting bird population has decreased significantly. And so, of course, have the sound levels.

Sometimes I wonder if I will live to witness the moment when fuglabjarg becomes a metaphor for silence.

We are entering a new era, where the birds grow quiet, lakes form at the edges of glaciers and valleys start to appear where there used to be glaciers.

What do you call a valley that used to be a glacier?

The longest bridge in Iceland once arched over a vast plain of sediment formed by glacial meltwater called Skeidararsandur, which translates as boat-river-sand. In 1974 it was our great engineering achievement: about half a mile long and built to withstand substantial glacial flooding from the river that ran in hundreds of veins over a huge stretch of black sand. Even so, it was severely damaged by a massive flood after a volcanic eruption in the ’90s.

A bridge at Skeidararsandur now extends over much dryer land. The glacier has retreated considerably since 2000; the river found another path and a marvel of engineering stands there awkwardly, as if it has stayed too long at a party.

At the same time the black sands of Skeidararsandur are also changing: With the river gone, the sand is not replenished with new glacial sediment, and vegetation is starting to cover the area.

What do you call boat-river-sand when the boats and the river are gone and the sand is covered in forest?

Skeidararjokull, boat-river-glacier, is a valley glacier in southeast Iceland, flowing from Vatnajokull, Europe’s largest glacier, covering about 3000 square miles. I have crossed it myself with friends. It is strange to travel over such a massive and powerful entity, surrounded by ancient ice as far as the eyes can see, in places as thick as a skyscraper under your feet. It is hard for the mind to grasp how something so enormous can be so fragile.

The formations are like nothing else I have ever encountered. First it was as if we were walking on the white scales of an ancient dragon; then suddenly we were in a forest of black sand pyramids until we came across something smooth and wide, almost like a highway. Out of habit, I looked both ways before I crossed it.

I said the landscape and the language have always been in conversation. But in that moment it was as though the glacier was actually telling me something — that somewhere between the pyramids and the highways, something went wrong. If I looked at the nearby mountains, I could see a clear tideline in the middle where the color changed. The line marked the surface of the glacier up to 1995; since then, according to glaciologists, the glacier has lost mass almost every year.

In 2014 the glacier Okjokull was declared dead. Ok was the name of the volcano where the glacier, the jokull, was located. Now it’s just a patch of ice on a volcano, known as simply Ok. Anthropologists from Rice University in Texas asked me to write a short text for a plaque to commemorate Ok. Internationally, of course, those letters mean “O.K.” — ironically — but in Icelandic, Ok means “yoke,” like the beams that you put on your shoulder to balance a heavy burden. Or the yoke you put on two oxen to plow a field.

The final text for the plaque was:

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose it 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.

August 2019

415 ppm of CO₂

This year, levels of CO₂ have already exceeded 430 ppm.

The glaciers of Iceland cover about 10 percent of the land, but if that ice were spread like icing on a cake, the whole country would be under about 100 feet of ice. The next iconic glacier to go is likely to be Snaefellsjokull — snow-mountain-glacier. In “Journey to the Center of Earth,” by Jules Verne, Snaefellsjokull is the gateway to a subterranean world.

What do you call Snaefellsjokull when it is not a glacier anymore? Just Snaefell? What about when the snow is gone?

And when the glaciers are all gone, what do you call an island that used to be Iceland? Just … Land?

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