Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.02.2019, Page 21

21 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 02— 2019
jökull glacier—over 300 times.
We meet Einar in his café, in the
shadow of the glacier. He was born on
the next farm over. “The glacier was
just there when I was a boy,” he says.
“I remember the feeling when I first
dared to walk on it a little: I felt like it
was going to swallow me whole. Some-
how it was not normal to be walking on
a glacier. Soon after, I started guiding
people on the glacier, but today I still
have the feeling when I step off the ice
of coming back from the sea onto dry
land, onto solid ground again.”
THE ENDLESS CRACK
Einar says that he’s still continually
learning to respect the glaciers. Even
after decades of venturing onto the ice
many times a week in all kinds of condi-
tions, Vatnajökull is full of surprises.
“A year and a half ago, in October,
there was suddenly a huge, endless
crack in the middle of the plateau of
the crater on the highest mountain of
Vatnajökull,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘This
is impossible! There can’t be a crevasse
here, on the flat ground.’ I stood looking
down into it, and my stomach rolled. It
had happened because of volcanic activ-
ity: suddenly there was a depression,
and the crack opened up, going down
maybe 500 metres into the caldera. In
a whiteout, it would have put me in
danger. Things like that teach you to
always show respect for the glaciers.”
A FOREST UNDER ICE
For Einar, the glaciers have always
been a fact of life. His knowledge and
experience of them runs generations
deep. Seeing the hulking mass of
Europe’s largest glacier on a day-to-day
basis gives him a local perspective of
the wider questions surrounding the
glaciers.
“I have homegrown theories,” he
says. “I’m no Donald Trump, but there
was climate change before human
influence. Iceland has been a barometer
of climate change for centuries. When
I go to the ice cave behind Jökulsárlón,
we drive past the homestead of the first
settler of southern Iceland, Hrollau-
gur of Fell. At the time he lived there,
this whole area was covered with trees
and vegetation—it was a first called
Breiðamörk, or ‘big forest.’ Today it’s
all barren riverbeds and moss, and it’s
called Sandur.”
FOSSIL TREASURE
Based on the name of the Breiðamerka-
jökull glacier, Einar has long been tell-
ing his guests that there used to be a
forest where Jökulsárlón is now. “Two
years ago, I started going to an ice cave
on the east side of Jökulsárlón that I
call the Treasure Island cave—because
I found a treasure there,” he says. “I
found a piece of old tree that’s actu-
ally from the time when it was a forest.
Now, instead of just saying ‘This used
to be forest,’ I have proof. We sent it for
carbon dating, and it was 3,000 years
old.”
He brings out the chunk of fossilised
wood. It feels as light as air. “So back
then, the glacier was much smaller
than it is today, and it grew over the
forest,” he says, carefully turning the
log over in his hands. “That’s the situ-
ation my forefathers came to live in,
in the year 900. These farmers would
be shocked to see how much ice there
is today, and how little vegetation. I
take a little comfort in that—knowing
that although the glaciers are getting
smaller, they’re so much bigger than
they used to be.”
Einar does, however, remain open
to the idea of anthropogenic climate
change. “I do worry that we might tip
the balance with our human pollu-
tion,” he finishes. “We should do what
we can do, even if the pollution from
big eruptions is much larger in scale.
It’s something new we’re adding to the
equation. It’s not good for people to live
with pollution anyway, like the cities in
India where people are dying just from
being there. It’s not about saving the
whole planet, but just trying to think
about what kind of place we want to live
in.”
ARE GLACIERS ALIVE?
US geographer and glaciologist M Jack-
son has been visiting Iceland and the
Vatnajökull region for almost a decade.
Her recently released book, “The Secret
Lives of Glaciers,” mixes climate science
with an examination of what glaciers
mean to us as individuals, communi-
ties, and as a species.
The research proved to be an inter-
esting challenge. M designed her
methodology as she went, coming back
to Höfn for repeat visits and forming
close connections with the commu-
nity. “I started showing up and spent
two summers getting my feet on the
ground, learning a bit of Icelandic and
understanding the geography of this
place,” she says. “I tested different
methods to see if they were appropri-
ate. A lot of them weren’t. Glaciers
don’t push back if you measure them,
but when you speak to people, a typical
analytical approach isn’t going to work.
You need to have a series of open ended
conversations. It’s long term, slow-as-
ice research. But I love it.”
M spent several long periods in
Iceland, the longest of which was nine
months. Her careful approach allowed
for some surprising viewpoints to
emerge by combining physical and
human geography. “There’s immense
complexity in ice and how people relate
to ice,” she says. “That’s what I wanted
to show—the different ways that
Icelanders think about ice. There’s no
one way. There’s no right.”
SHORT TERM BENEFITS
One thing that struck her is that the
people of Höfn are, in the short term,
benefitting from the shrinking glaciers.
“Outside of Iceland, people are having
this conversation that the glaciers
are melting, and that’s the very worst
thing,” she says. “That’s the global
narrative. But in Iceland, something
that struck me as gold is that you can
have real conversations about what’s
happening, which includes short-term
advantages.”
One example of this is the increase
in glacier-related tourism. “People are
coming to see this ice before it’s gone,”
M continues. “Ten years ago, living in
Höfn was a pretty hard time. There
weren’t a lot of jobs, or kids. It didn’t
feel prosperous. Every year I’d go back
to the glaciers and be stunned by the
change—but where you don’t see a lot
of success with the ice, you see a lot of
success in society.”
M also discovered diverse opinions
between age groups. “Older people had
longer memories of the ice—genera-
tional memories,” says M. “They’d say,
‘I’ll miss the glaciers, but I’ll be kind
of glad they’re gone. They’re no longer
gonna destroy our farms, our families,
our future.’ On the other hand, young
Icelanders say that they’re losing their
landscape and identity. So you get this
very authentic complexity. Too often we
tend to reduce things into one simple
narrative.”
SMELLS LIKE GLACIER
In addition to recording the thoughts of
others, M had time to deepen her own
relationship with the glacier tongues
of Vatnajökull. She spent time working
on glaciers like Breiðamerkurjökull,
Heinabergsjökull and Skálafellsjökull,
finding that each glacier has distinctive
characteristics.
“Glaciers are so vastly different
from one another,” she says. “They
each respond differently to the stresses
of changing climate. But it’s more
than that—they’ve created their own
landscapes, and responded in differ-
ent ways; they have different sedi-
ments, and different movements, and
they move around mountains differ-
ently. They have different sounds. You
know when you’re on Breiðamerkur-
jökull: it has a whole different sound-
set and smell set than if you’re in the
enclosed space of Fláajökull. Over time
I’ve gotten to know them and become
friends with them. I know we’re not
supposed to say that in science—but
these glaciers flow down into our lives
in really amazing ways, and it enriches
who we are.”
THIS IS WHAT
MATTERS
New glacier technologies are also
emerging that could possibly be put to
good use, were the will there to explore
them. “In Pakistan there’s technology to
breed and make glaciers,” says M. “But
that doesn’t fit with the Western scien-
tific model of how we think about ice.
We could take this indigenous glacier-
making ability to drought-stricken
regions of the world. But we’re not
having those conversations.”
M’s enthusiasm is infectious. We
finish by discussing Iceland’s climate
policy—which includes the aim of
becoming a carbon
neutral country by
2040—and whether
a n y t h i n g c a n b e
done to preserve
the glaciers, and our
symbiotic relation-
ship with them.
Even as a small
country, Iceland’s
climate policy is
w o r t h c e l e b r a t -
ing, according to
M. “Iceland creat-
ing and enacting a
climate policy is not
necessarily about
Iceland,” she says.
“So to have a small
country say ‘This is
what’s important
to us, these are our values, and this is
what future we want to move into’ is
actually a message to the world. That
goes around the globe. Iceland creat-
ing a policy about climate that puts a
real strong emphasis on how we engage
with those big issues is a way forward
for everyone. Iceland can be a leader
here. It’s a chance to say to the world:
‘This is what matters.’”
“Iceland creating
a policy about
climate can be a
way forward for
the world. It’s a
chance to say to
the world: ‘This is
what matters.’”
- M Jackson,
Glaciologist &
Author
M. Jackson