- In Iceland, people gathered on August 18, 2019 to commemorate the loss of the glacier Okjokull due to climate change.
- The said glacier was officially declared dead in 2014 at the age of 700.
- The glacier was officially declared dead by the Icelandic Meteorological Office when it was no longer thick enough to move. What once was glacier has been reduced to a small patch of ice atop a volcano.
- Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir, Environment Minister Gudmundur Ingi Gudbrandsson and former Irish President Mary Robinson took part in a commemoration ceremony later in the day.
- A bronze plaque was unveiled in a ceremony on Sunday afternoon to mark Okjokull — which translates to “Ok glacier” — in the west of Iceland, in the presence of local researchers and their peers at Rice University in the US, who initiated the project.
- The plaque is also labelled “415 ppm CO2”, referring to the record level of carbon dioxide measured in the atmosphere last May.
- Iceland loses about 11 billion tonnes of ice per year, and scientists fear that all of the island country’s 400-plus glaciers will be gone by 2200.
