Chasing Ice

Inside the constructed ice cave at Perlan Museum, Reykjavik

I spent my first day back in Iceland chasing ice. You would think I had had enough of it in Greenland, with icebergs floating in the bay at Ilulissat outside the hotel window. But back in busy Reykjavik again, the only thing with ice in it is the Perlan Museum.

I decided to go and do the tourist thing as it had been recommended to me and I wasn’t disappointed. I did leave a bit sadder than when I arrived as it is a historical chronicle of ice and water and the geology of this amazing island with its volcanic eruptions, glaciers and waterfalls.

You can see glaciers crack and watch them disappear into ice lakes, both for real and as an interactive display. They showed Okjökull (Ok glacier) which officially lost its glacier status in 2014, and a funeral was held for it in 2019, the year I first visited Iceland. Scientists and glaciologists in Iceland confidently predict that all of Iceland glaciers will disappear within the next 100 - 200 years. I felt so sad reading all the exhibits and seeing the stuffed polar bear that drifted into Iceland in 2008 on an ice-flow but became dangerous and was put down.

Only a few days previously I had been in Greenland up close to real glaciers and feeling the power of nature in the ice. I find myself constantly comparing the two countries and know that for all that I love Iceland, Greenland has somehow crept into my heart. I do feel like I am chasing this fast disappearing ice in its glorious glaciers.

More frightening was resting up in my hotel room on the last night in Greenland and watching a move called Ice that starred two Australian actors, Richard Roxburgh and Sam Neil. I loved Roxburgh in the TV series Rake, and here he was in this movie as an impassioned environmental scientist trying to prevent oil drilling on the Greenland ice shelf. Sam Neil was the baddy oil mogul who came to a disastrous end, but so did the ice sheet which was drilled, cracked and fractured,

Within hours the fresh water had poured into the ocean, desalinating the Atlantic, reversing the Gulf stream and plunging the whole of northern Europe and northern America into a new ice age. Wow! It was a bit of a B grade thriller based on the book by James Follett. It started out as a TV series but the date for this disaster was 2020, when another sort of disaster took the world by storm, so it did lose some credibility. However what it predicts could certainly happen depending on the social, political and economic decisions which are made in the next 10 years.

One of the artworks I made for my Fire and Ice exhibition I had in 2020 was called Extinction Tourism, Walking the Receding Glaciers. I hadn’t understood the full impact of this until I went to Greenland. We don’t want our great grandchildren watching the Greenland ice in an interactive museum. Let’s hope we can save it for the future.

Kissing the ice inside a real ice cave glacier in Iceland, 2019