Photo by Grétar Thorvaldsson/Málmsteypan Hella
Words by Andri Snær Magnason
Plaque design by Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer
NASA’s Earth Observatory
With more than ten percent of the country covered by glaciers, Iceland is the front line of climate change. It is losing billions of tons of glacial ice each year.
NASA’s Earth Observatory
“Our glaciers are the thermometer for the world,” said the Icelandic glaciologist Andri Gunnarsson in 2017, “and they're just disappearing.” His colleagues predict that all of Iceland’s glaciers will have disappeared by 2200.
NASA’s Earth Observatory
That future has already begun to arrive. In 2014, glaciologists announced Iceland’s first major glacier, named Okjökull, to be dead. Iceland's letter to the future, by the writer Andri Snær Magnason (b.1973), now marks the spot where the glacier once stood in the form of a copper plaque.
NASA’s Earth Observatory
The letter, directed to the future and dated August 2019, ends with a record of CO2 levels on the date of its unveiling: 415 ppm. It is still climbing.
