People Held Glacier Funerals in Iceland to Mourn Environmental Loss — a Ritual That Could Help Us Face Ecological Grief
One cloudy August morning in 2019, one hundred or so people hiked up an Icelandic mountainside to say their last goodbye to a glacier. Okjökull, or Ok, had once sprawled across the summit, but was now reduced to a lifeless patch of ice — glaciologists had declared it “dead” several years earlier.
Iceland’s prime minister gave a speech, locals shared stories of drinking the glacier’s meltwater, and the crowd mounted a bronze plaque to commemorate Ok’s passing, like a gravestone. It was addressed to the future and read, in part, “We know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
The ceremony looked much like a funeral, complete with a mourning party. But what does it mean to mourn a glacier, or a charred forest, or a collapsed ecosystem?
What Is Ecological Grief?
These questions are gaining urgency as communities around the world grapple with environmental loss. Courtney Howard, a Canadian physician who studies health threats related to climate change, views glacier funerals and other such rituals as expressions of “ecological grief,” a term she helped popularize, according to a report in The Lancet.
“This is a normal human reaction to worrisome change in the world that we love,” Howard told Discover, akin to more familiar forms of grief. “It’s really the natural consequence […] of biophilia” — that is, love of nature. It often manifests as “solastalgia,” a sense of homesickness for a place that still exists but has changed dramatically.
When she experienced her first bout of ecological grief in 2009, after witnessing rapid environmental change in the high Arctic, Howard had no words for what she was going through. She suspects many people feel the same but struggle to conceptualize the experience. It’s important to process these emotions, she said, just as we might after a cancer diagnosis or the death of a loved one.
Glacier funerals offer one outlet for bending fear, frustration, and sorrow toward more productive outcomes. Another group of researchers writing in Nature Climate Change explains how these funerals can help transform climate anxiety into a collective reflection and can turn grief into action, public messaging, and even hope.
Read More: Why Are 6,000-Year-Old Artifacts Suddenly Resurfacing Again?
Expressing Climate Greif
On the flip side, Howard added, she finds it difficult to engage with environmental issues until she has dealt with any ecological grief welling up inside. Her life was again rattled by climate change in 2023, when wildfires ravaged the land around her home in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. Not long after, that year’s Global Tipping Points Report was released, detailing the latest irreversible trends in Earth’s climate system.
“I tried to read it while the smoke was still swirling, and I just couldn’t,” she told Discover.
It took several months before she felt ready to revisit the report, and even then, her grieving remained unfinished. To cross the finish line, she required her own ritual.
A year after the wildfires, Howard, who has a degree in dance, and two other local dancers gathered in the burnt forest outside Yellowknife to film an improvised dance. Amid a backdrop of blackened trees and dusty earth, their agonized postures capture deep despair, but also a crucial step toward healing.
“That helped me both confront and process my emotions around the wildfires in a way I definitely hadn’t done prior to that,” Howard said. “I remember I woke up the next day, I felt so much better.”
Other Glacier Funerals
In much of secular Western society, our ceremonial muscles have atrophied. Even if we’re accustomed to funerals for other humans, it will strike many as bizarre and perhaps pointless to extend the same treatment to landscapes.
Yet “when we look at human civilization across time and place, ceremony has been part of it,” Howard said. “We don’t tend to keep things that aren’t useful to us.”
After the commemoration for Ok in 2019, more glacier funerals followed. One was held that same year for Switzerland’s Pizol glacier, another in 2020 for Oregon’s Clark glacier, and yet another in 2021 for Mexico’s Ayoloco glacier. In 2024, as the rate of glacier death accelerated, a pair of anthropologists from Rice University created a “glacier graveyard” near Reykjavík, marked by fifteen sculpted-ice gravestones.
To Howard, these practices serve as a powerful antidote to the hopelessness climate change so often evokes, and also to the loneliness of facing ecological grief alone. “It brings us into the community,” she said. “That is what we need if we want to change the systems that are leading to this destruction.”
Read More: As Glaciers Retreat, Powerful Volcanoes May Erupt More Frequently Across the Planet
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