Glacier Funeral

marvaða was honored to collaborate on the launch of the Global Glacier Casualty List (GGCL), an innovative platform created to visualize data on recently vanished —and soon-to-disappear— glaciers around the world. The initiative is accompanied by the establishment of the world’s first glacier graveyard, located on the Seltjarnarnes peninsula, just outside Reykjavík.

The launch day began with a gathering at marvaða, followed by a solemn procession to the glacier graveyard. There, fifteen headstones—carved from ice by Icelandic sculptor Ottó Magnússon—were unveiled, each bearing the name of a glacier lost to the accelerating effects of global warming.

The GGCL project is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Rice University, University of Iceland, Iceland Glaciological Society, the World Glacier Monitoring Service, and UNESCO, underscoring the urgency of documenting and bearing witness to glacier retreat in the context of climate change.