It was in 2016 that Cymene Howe, a scholar at Rice University, Texas, first heard of the “death” of Okjökull, a small icecap in western Iceland, two years earlier.
Glaciers are charismatic, with snouts and tongues of ice that crawl over land as they grow, but when their ice becomes too thin to continue moving – an increasingly common event amid rising temperatures – the glacier is pronounced dead.
