Of Time and Water

In the future, glaciers will be an alien phenomenon, rare as a Bengal tiger. Having lived in the time of the white giants will become swaddled in a fairytale glow, like having stroked a dragon or handled the eggs of the great auk. Glaciers will certainly be found in the Arctic, Greenland and Antarctica for a few thousand more years, but probably not in the Alps and the Andes; they will disappear in most parts of the Himalayas and Iceland. People will ask, how were glaciers described at the beginning of the 21st century?

I was not as familiar with the glaciers of Iceland as my own grandparents were. I had seen them from afar and gone up to Snæfellsjökull in winter, but winter glaciers are nothing like summer glaciers, and outlet glaciers are quite different from an ice sheet or a minor glacier.

And so I and a small crew planned to cross Skeidarárjökull, in Iceland, one of the major valley glaciers heading south from Vatnajökull. It was the end of July 2012; all the winter snow had melted and all the cracks and shapes in the ice were as clear as they would get. This was actually our second assault on the glacier. A few years earlier, we had headed up there in pouring rain and pitched our tents on a low gravel bed. When we woke up in the morning, pools and springs had formed under the campsite. It was almost as if someone had struck the ground with a magic wand, causing water to well up out of little bulging eyes; people woke drenched in deep puddles, and so we turned back home.

This time, the plan was to camp at the edge of the glacier, fairly high up, and cross the glacier in one long day trip, a total of about 25 kilometers. Then, we would camp on a green terrace, one of the most beautiful campsites in the country, and make another long day trip into Skaftafell National Park.

We woke up in crappy weather; the tent was shaking in the wind. It was warm inside our sleeping bags but shivering cold once we crawled out of them. We packed up quickly and set off in spite of the poor visibility. At the edge of the glacier, we ran into some hikers who had crossed the glacier during the night: a French father and son and the father’s friend. They were cold and dazed, almost in shock after the night’s hardships. They had lost their way and come across a crevasse that could not be traversed; it led them astray so that they ended up too low down, where they got into a maze of deadly deep crevasses. And so they went back and forth blindly in the fog and rain and darkness. Ten hours of walking became 20 hours. They feared for their lives and pitched their tent as soon as they stepped off the ice, bone-tired and relieved that they had reached safety.

We ourselves tramped through slushy mud at the glacier’s edge, where glacier meets land. We tried to avoid the quicksand that forms when melting glacier ice seeps water into the sediment. The glacier was black with sand for the first part of our journey, and we could make out strange objects on the ice: flat stones on thin ice pillars, like works of art made by aliens. The weather was slowly clearing, until we started to see before us an endless breadth of tussocks, as though innumerable white turtle shells stretched out as far as the eye could see.

We saw that in the middle of the mountain slope on each side of the glacier was a light stripe that marked its surface level as it had been just a few years ago. In many places high up in the cirques, we could discern so-called dead ice, floes still hanging there in the rock after the surface had subsided. It tests every sense of one’s brain to imagine a glacier’s surface 30 meters above one’s height, the height of a 10-story building, extending it in the mind, as though it’s a vaulted ceiling over the entire expanse, reaching one edge of the glacier to the other and a whole kilometer out onto the sand.

Our path continued, and now it was as if each of the tussocks were individual scales, with the outlet glacier the tail of a white dragon. We came upon something that resembled a black sand pyramid, and then more pyramids gradually appeared until we entered an entire forest of black pyramids in the middle of the glacier. The evaporation from the sand cones emitted fog veils; little streams trickled between them, creating a micro-landscape, almost like a bonsai landscape, little mountains and little rivers and little towns, and we were mesmerized by the shapes and the beauty. Between the pyramids, streams ran like little waterslides. It was tempting to take a ride, but if we followed them, we’d end up in a glacial hole. These gullets were white holes that became blue holes and black holes that extended as far as 300 meters down to the bottom; it was vital to take special care around them. The thought of losing one’s footing and disappearing down into a hole was the stuff of nightmares.

I tried to interpret the glacier’s shapes, the pyramid forest opening out into a streak on the surface that resembled a two-lane highway. In the middle of the “road” was a black line as if to mark the lanes. The surface was smooth and level; one could have driven at 70 miles per hour as far as the eye could see. I involuntarily looked both ways as I walked across the “road” and wondered if the glacier was giving me a signal. Maybe it was telling me that, somewhere between the pyramids and the motorways, something had gone wrong. I lay down on the cold ice and put my ear to a narrow crevasse that seemed a whole eternity deep despite being only a few inches wide. The ice in the wound was as clear as crystal. I looked at the veins and bubbles in the body of the glacier, which created a strange three-dimensional feeling. I heard how the water gushed far down in the quivering space like a dark bass, water dancing somewhere deep down at the bottom, like a giant xylophone, a rock harp, an ice harp. The glacier’s swan song.

Now that the glacier is changing faster than ever before, I feel within myself a paradox. My being on the glacier comes from advances and technologies, the production and mass extraction of Earth’s resources. By the time humans were able to cross glaciers, to count the nesting places of crocodiles and to study the song of the humpback whales, we’d grown so strong and expanded so far that what we were finally able to measure and understand had already started disappearing.

In documentaries, melting glaciers are a dramatic spectacle: gigantic ice chunks crash and rumble as they calve into the sea. But a dying glacier is actually no more dramatic than the normal changes of the spring season. Ice melts in the heat and the sun, forming streams that frolic and splash, disappearing quietly.

…

The old teak shelf in Grandpa Árni’s writing office in Iceland was buried under anthologies of flowers, books by Halldór Laxness and the full collection of Jökull, the journal of the Iceland Glaciological Society. It held one of my favorite books: Benedikt Gröndal’s massive book of birds. One day I noticed a beautiful blue book on the shelf: In Reindeer Country, by Helgi Valtýsson, published in 1945. The book describes Helgi’s travels with the photographer Edvard Sigurgeirsson in the highlands north of Vatnajökull in 1939, 1943 and the year Iceland gained independence from Denmark, 1944. Their expedition sought the last reindeer herd in Iceland, the finaldescendants of the reindeer that had been brought to Iceland in 1787. Reindeer once lived throughout the country but had since become nearly extinct. The last herd survived in a kind of secret valley at the foot of a glacier, Brúarárjökull; the animals’ calving grounds were in a place called Kringilsárrani.

Helgi was a romantic, a progressive, a poet. For some reason, his reindeer book had passed my notice at the time I was writing my own book Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation, a defense of the Icelandic highlands and of the region his book describes. When I opened In Reindeer Country, I was struck by its lovely hand-painted photographs and by its travel descriptions. But the text was far from an everyday account of travels in the mountains. The words rose from time to time into a a baroque hymn rather than a travel narrative:

“The wild highlands are a wide embrace, mountain blue. Their stillness quietens you, listening…Fascinated you attend to your own soul’s breath, this essence you’ve forgotten about for years. It’s here you first perceive your spirit’s immeasurable expanse, and you stand still and astounded in the deep silence amid unspeakable reverence for your soul’s divinity.”

I’ve read volumes of sublime nature poems but I can’t remember having encountered something so elevated. Helgi is writing a praise song for East Iceland and for the wilderness north of Vatnajökull, especially Kringilsárrani, which is unique in Iceland and, indeed, the world. Kringilsárrani was once a kind of island, a 50-square-kilometer wedge covered in vegetation, 600 meters above sea level. It was bounded by a triangle formed of the Brúarárjökull glacier along one end and two untamed, almost impassable glacial rivers that merged on either side. There were high glacial peaks and so-called push moraines, heaps of fertile land the glacier deposited when it surged forward around 1890. It was almost as if the glacier had taken the surface vegetation and rolled it up in front of it like a carpet. These heaps could be as high as 10 meters; they were unparalleled in modern geology. Only on Svalbard were there examples of glaciers that had thrust land up in front of them in this same way.

Helgi and Edvard stayed in this tremendous wilderness that hardly anyone had ever visited. Edvard photographed and filmed while Helgi kept a journal of their travels as he reflected on his confrontation with the mountain’s glory. Helgi Valtýsson was born in 1877 and came of age while the spirit of the first Icelandic independence movement resonated over those waters. Helgi describes his time in Kringilsárrani as a spiritual enlightenment. He writes his text into a tradition in which true manhood involves composing praise poems about plovers and whimbrels and mountain lakes, a manhood that involves serenading the summer, the mountains, the flower-covered slopes and hope itself. He pursued that despite living through other, harsher social realities of the times: infant mortality, poverty, disease. But this romantic view of life isnotable for its gentleness; one is unlikely to find a better example of the unadulterated worship of nature anywhere else in Icelandic literature.

On their first trip, Helgi and Edvard were in Kringilsárrani for two weeks without any contact with the outside world, from late August to early September 1939. By the time they returned, the Germans had invaded Poland. The book was published in 1945, the same year the atomic bombs were dropped, the same year modern “Atom poetry” emerged on the Icelandic literary scene. The world had lost its innocence; war’s miseries had caused many to wonder where he’d gone, this so-called God. Books that unabashedly set their faith in a beauty that was in harmony with the almighty no longer paid their way. Poets instead composed inscrutable modernist poems. Steinn Steinarr wrote about “Time and the Water;” other poets wrote about the “nothing” that happened after death. Europe burned, yet the war changed the world and gave rise to numerous industries. The aviation industry altered entirely, as did metal production; the nuclear industry emerged while mass production expanded, its capacity all too evident. The world’s aluminum industry grew by 1,000 percent in just a few years to meet the war’s need for bombs and airplanes. The US government instructed Alcoa to build 20 new factories in three years.

At the end of the war, however, production did not slow back down again. The aluminum industry found an alternative outlet for its products with the emergence of the disposable consumer economy. Enterprising designers developed products that allowed people to use dishes, cutlery, food packaging, aluminum foil and other valuable things only a single time. They packaged drinks in energy-intensive aluminum cans that people could throw away. This mindset went against the values held by previous generations, who had learned to respect what was valuable, to throw nothing away, to finish their meals, to fix things, to make use of everything.

The packaging industry and a consumer society thus combined to create an infinite demand for raw materials, which slowly but surely intruded into untouched areas around the globe. In 2002, the world’s consumer machine stretched its tentacles into the northernmost corner of the planet: a decision was taken to flood the bulk of Kringilsárrani under a 57 square kilometer reservoir behind the proposed Kárahnjúkar Dam. The purpose? Producing subsidized electricity for the Alcoa aluminum smelter in Reydarfjördur. The plant produces a fraction of the aluminum that Americans throw into landfills. An annual amount of aluminum equal to four times the size of the US commercial air fleet ends up on such trash heaps just from aluminum cans alone. Recycling more cans in the US would eliminate the need for three or four such factories.

“The all-encompassing silence of God’s great expanse” and the whole environment Helgi described in his book finally drowned under nearly 200 meters of muddy glacial water when a plug was set into the Kárahnjúkar Dam in the fall of 2006. But the area did not drown forever because the water level fluctuates, revealing several square kilometers of shoreline of fine, light silt. Each spring, this lifeless land appears, gray as a ghost.

…

I went out to the Kringilsárrani reserve while it still existed and was able to experience firsthand this magical world Helgi wrote about. To walk through this valley of animals alongside the Jökulsá á Fjöllum riverbed; to see goose nests amid the columnar basalt walls that formed the gorge’s sides; to stand on the lava-red bedrock as the gushing glacial river surged over the falls of Raudaflúd—it was incomparable. How mesmerizing it was, watching the river break through a narrow crevasse and practically dissolve into a thundering torrent that flung rocks uphill, like some uncontrollable eruption. A falcon hovered high above me. I found the lone rock standing on a fragile foundation, humanoid in shape. This rock had become symbolic of the area and it did not feel like any of the other rocks in the area. Even though I’d come in peace, I felt it was displeased by my presence.

I never would have dared speak my mind the way Helgi had, never would dare write something in his style: “There at Töfrafoss, my soul’s harp strings vibrated while the Creator thrummed Kringilsá’s burgeoning bass….” If I’d used this kind of language in Dreamland, I’d have been written off as New Age nonsense. I’d found myself overwhelmed by melancholy at the unruly devastation that washed out this peerless region, yet I chose words that seemed moderate and inviting to readers. I discussed the area’s importance for Iceland’s image, its potential tourist income, the area’s research value, how the highlands were a magnet for foreign currency as a filming location for movies and commercials. Movies create an experience, but the image of a landscape can’t replace a visit to the location. We live in a time when money is the measure of reality. I couldn’t argue nature’s right to exist, its essential value, by saying that we might find God’s all-encompassing expanse there.

This dispute over the Icelandic highlands flipped logical arguments on their heads. Instead of an area’s untouched quality being taken as proof of its value and significance, that fact was turned against the region; as a result, it was branded “unpopular.” Nature needed high enough “ratings,” went the argument: people looking at it or using it, building hotels or gas stations or hamburger joints, bringing tour buses and guides. You had to be able to use nature in some way, even if only as the backdrop for a car commercial. Nothing is allowed to have an undefined purpose; everything must be quantifiable, regardless of whether or not the metrics match the reality.

The Icelandic energy companies had big plans for the complete destruction of many of the foremost pearls of the Icelandic highlands. They were going to sink Thjórsárver, the largest nesting ground of pinkfooted geese in Iceland, under a reservoir the size of Manhattan. The geothermal areas in the Torfajökull region were in danger: Aldeyjarfoss in Skjálfandafljót; the white glacial rivers of Skagafjördur; almost everything that was beautiful and sacred in Iceland’s highlands was at risk of being dammed, exploded or drowned in order to sell cheap energy to multinational producers.

Iceland, which had escaped the worst of the industrial revolution, was hell-bent on making all the world’s 20th-century mistakes in the 21st century’s opening years. Many people I knew couldn’t write or think about anything else. It was easy to see how the intense activism burned out one individual after another.

It was not until I read Helgi’s book that I understood how my contemporaries and I were inextricably locked into the prevailing discourse. His writing wasn’t circumscribed by an economic language in which education is an investment and nature is merely an untapped resource. The possibility that nature could be something higher, something more exalted, something beyond definition and even “holy”—in our time, that isn’t considered a valid argument. Helgi was free, not required to discuss tourism, employment, export earnings. He was able to write the way he felt about beauty, nature and the sublime.

Helgi Valtýsson was born in East Iceland two years after the Askja eruption of 1875 caused considerable damage. He came of age at a time when people still died of starvation in Iceland, when 20 percent of Icelanders left the country to seek opportunity in America and Canada. He was barely 40 in the Great Frost winter of 1918, the year the Spanish flu killed nearly 500 people in Iceland. In 1939, Helgi would have been in his 60s. Seventy years later, Iceland had an abundance of plenty: among the most cars in the world per person, the most TVs, the most planes, the most trawlers and by far the greatest aluminum production per capita. It was at that exact moment that the Kringilsárrani reserve had its protections removed and was drowned. Photographer Ragnar Axelsson called me when the wild rapids of Raudaflúd were submerged; he told me Stuðlagátt would start to go under by the week’s end. I got a lump in my throat. I felt like he was sharing the death of a friend.

How could Helgi feel these sublime emotions toward nature during times when hardship and hunger still prevailed in Iceland? In Helgi’s youth, romantic poetry was the most popular artform; in poems, generations of starving poets managed to praise flowers and birds with such art that half of Iceland’s bird species have not been hunted or eaten since the mid-19th century.

According to scientists’ predictions about global temperature increases, ocean levels will rise by between 30 centimeters and one meter this century due to the melting of glaciers and the swelling of the seas. All the Icelandic glacial melting combined is predicted to raise the sea level by more than a centimeter; if the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica start melting, we could expect a rise of tens of meters. If we are conservative and expect only a 0.74-meter rise over the century, about 400,000 square kilometers of land will sink into the ocean. That’s an area larger than Germany and four times the size of Iceland. Cities, coastlines, ports and tidal flats are at stake. About 115 million people live in these areas.

These consequences stem from rising sea levels alone, never mind the consequences of rising temperatures, desertification, drought, forest fires, falling groundwater levels, thawing permafrost and ocean acidification.

Where Helgi found the all-encompassing silence of God’s great expanse in one small area, what words might we use about the atmosphere we all breathe, about the way humanity is changing that atmosphere’s composition? What words apply when people worry about the ocean’s future, about its ecosystem? What words should we use for the rainforests given they are nothing less than the earth’s lungs?

…

We believe words are easily understood, that the world we perceive and understand from newspapers and books is the world we perceive and understand. It’s not that simple. If we could perceive in granular detail what the words “global warming” contain, they should be like the threat in a fairy tale: we should feel terror. It can take decades, even centuries, to understand new words and concepts.

Pastor Hallgrímur Pétursson is considered one of the masters of Icelandic language and poetry. His Passion Hymns were first printed in 1666. The 30th hymn begins, “Hear, my soul, this sinfulness! Conscience should have intervened.” The words in this verse—“soul,” “sinfulness,” “conscience”—these were the dominant words in that era’s culture. For centuries, those words were pure power in the hands of priests and of the ruling class. Men confessed their sinfulness, purified their consciences and secured their eternal souls in heaven. But these words had not always existed. During the ninth century, the Age of Settlement, it was unlikely the Nordic people would have understood Hallgrímur’s lines. “Soul,” “sinfulness” and “conscience” entered the language with the Christian faith around the year 1000. These words would not have registered for the enterprising Vikings. They robbed and pillaged without worrying about their conscience or about sinfulness.

The poetry of the Vikings, skaldic poetry, was based on strict, specialized poetic conventions. In the wake of Christianity, a 10th-century poet would have faced a troubling challenge. Poems at the time were written using kennings derived from Norse mythology: two-word metaphorical comparisons, such as referring to Earth as “Odin’s bride” and to heaven as a “dwarf’s helmet.” How could such a poet explain God as the creator of heaven and Earth while writing in this tradition in which poetry itself was described as “mead of the Æsir” or “Odin’s gift” or “Kvasir’s blood”? Obviously, it would be problematic to refer to the pagan gods of the Æsir in a hymn praising the Christian God, the creator of heaven and earth. We use old ways of thinking to understand new ways of thining: at first God could not be spoken about except in terms of the “dwarf ’s helmet” and “Odin’s bride,” relying on the very pagan worldview that Christianity intended to clear away. Words affect our emotions, our feelings. Words enable us to get a handhold on the state of being and describe what slumbers in our chests. Words can tether actions that were previously invisible, frame them. In Icelandic, we have a word to describe a feeling of sweet yet melancholic nostalgia, the feeling that comes over you when you’re listening to a meaningful, possibly sad song from the past. This word is angurværd, which you might directly translate as “tendersadness.” The Faeroese have this concept, too, but their word is sorgblídni, which literally means “gentlegrief.” These sister tongues, Icelandic and Faeroese, have adopted two pairs of synonyms to express the same sentiment: tender/gentle, sadness/grief. Hallgrímur Pétursson was born in 1614 and could write passionately about sin and grace, but he would have had great difficulty writing poems about freedom, human rights, democracy and equality. He was a fine poet and a formidable thinker, but those words and concepts hardly existed in his century’s language.

When, in 1809, Jørgen Jørgensen, the man Icelanders call Jörundur, King of the Dog Days, fomented a revolution in Iceland, he arrested the local Danish authorities and issued a radical proclamation. He said: “Iceland is free, independent from Danish rule.”

To our ears, this might sound like an obvious wish for a subjugated nation, a nation that had lost its independence in 1262. When I was in school, I learned that Icelanders had yearned for freedom for 600 years. The reality was more complex. In all likelihood, nobody was asking for freedom back when Jørgen sailed ashore and issued his declaration. One fine day in the summer of 1809, a new and revolutionary idea set sail for the first time and came into being that very same day. The problem was that no one had ever thought that Icelanders ought to be seeking freedom or independence. It’s possible no one had ever spoken these words aloud in Iceland; as a result, they had little or no meaning.

Jørgen Jørgensen came to Iceland as an interpreter for a British soap merchant, Samuel Phelps, who was planning to buy tallow from Icelanders. While the countryside was well provisioned with those items, the war between England and Denmark had hindered sailing to Iceland for some time, and the country was beginning to sorely lack grain and other necessities. Count Frederich Trampe, the Danish governor, the Danish king’s highest-ranking official in Iceland, tried to obstruct the transaction: Danish merchants had a monopoly on trade in Iceland, and contravening the law was punishable by death. Phelps and his crew detained Trampe and imprisoned him in a cabin on board the merchant’s ship; meanwhile, Jørgen temporarily seized control of the country. He issued a declaration that Iceland was at peace with all nations. He made a national flag for the Icelanders and hoisted it: three cod.

At the time, strict rules governed domestic travel; Jørgen gave Icelanders freedom of movement, allowing people to move around the country as they liked and to trade without needing official documents or other permission; he mandated that every port engage in free trade with all states. That notion of free trade was a novelty in Iceland. He also announced that taxes would be cut by 50 percent immediately, putting an end to the practice of Icelandic tax revenue being exported to Denmark without Icelanders having anything to show for it. In addition, he proposed that Iceland should always have a year’s supply of grain as a way to protect against famine and economic fluctuation.

Jørgen had harsh words about the situation where a few “cowardly” merchants held the nation hostage. At the start of the 19th century, farm laborers constituted roughly 25 percent of the population, but as landless individuals, they were without freedom, people who couldn’t marry or have children, almost like drones in a beehive. Jørgen presented ideas for establishing a hospital and for improving midwifery and preventing infant mortality. Over 58 summer days, from July through August, he managed to propose improvements in almost all areas of society.

He undertook to govern the country until the people elected a parliamentary assembly and established a republic. Article 12 of his Declaration of July 11, 1809, states:

That we declare and promise to lay down our offices the moment that the representatives shall be assembled. The time appointed for the convocation for the assembly is the 1st of July 1810; and we will then resign, when a proper and suitable constitution shall be fixed on, and that the poor and common people shall have an equal share in the government with the rich and powerful.

The revolutionary spirit that had spread from France across Europe had barely reached Iceland; the foundational writings that defined terms like “freedom,” “equality” and “independence” had not been translated or published in Iceland. Jørgen was ahead of his time both there and almost in the whole world. The Danes’ constitutional democracy, established via the Danish Constitutional Act, did not come about until 1849. When Jørgen stated in 1809 that the poor should have as much of an equal share in governing the country as the rich, his ideas went further than those of the French Revolution; there, franchise was based on property. At that time, the overwhelming majority of Icelandic farmers were tenants; the idea that they were of the same stature as the well-off was an absurd concept for most people. They felt themselves to be lowlier, that power by default belonged in wealthier hands. Jørgen wanted to give us freedom, he wanted to abolish the monarchy in favor of democracy. He did not want power for himself—he was an anti-monarchist—but the only word the nation had to describe his role was “king,” the same way Norway’s skaldic poets could not say that God was the creator of heaven and earth without talking about “Odin’s bride.” Icelanders scoffed at Jørgen, giving him the nickname King of the Dog Days.

The apathy of the era’s Icelanders disappointed Jørgen. He offered people freedom, but no one understood what he meant, so no one wanted to accept it. The idea that a poor man could have as much to say as the wealthiest man was completely at odds with their reality. A parliament amounted to a new concept, even though the medieval sagas spoke of Iceland as having a parliament, the Althing, with its system of administration by rural delegates—and it was not a given that people wanted to return to such a bygone system.

There were many good reasons to distrust Jørgen. He was only 29 years old and was an incorrigible swashbuckler, a gambler, a womanizer and one might suspect his goal was to incorporate Iceland into the British Empire, but whatever his motives, the result was that radical ideas were being given voice in this country for the first time and people treated them like a joke. Magnús Stephensen, who was a leading judge and had also been instrumental in the founding of the Icelandic Society for National Enlightenment in 1794, offered the excuse in a letter that independence could not “be the wish of any good Icelander.”

Those who would later struggle to achieve these notions of freedom, equality and independence were either still in childhood in 1809 or hadn’t even been born yet. Baldvin Einarsson, considered one of the founding fathers of the Icelandic independence struggle, was eight years old; the poet Jónas Hallgrímsson was two; Jón Sigurdsson, Iceland’s hero of the Independence movement, the man whose birthday is Iceland’s national holiday, wouldn’t be born until 1811—and his notions of freedom were still considered radical even by the time he reached middle age.

When the Icelandic parliament, the Althing, was reestablished in 1843, only property owners had the right to vote; that amounted to about 2.2 percent of the population. It was not until 1915 that all men, as well as women 40 years or older, gained the right to vote in Iceland. Men and women did not get equal voting rights until 1920. Complete independence—an end to home rule and the abolition of the Union with Denmark—was not achieved until 1944. In elementary school, my generation learned that Icelanders had endured 600 years of oppression under Danish rule and that, during that whole time, the nation longed for freedom and independence. But that wasn’t at all the case. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that romantic poets came up with the idea that the nation had always wanted independence. It took Icelanders more than 100 years of poems, speeches, forums, declarations, translations and conversations in Copenhagen taverns to fully understand the terms set out in Jørgen’s declaration. Only then was there a foundation for discussing these ideas and so a basis for achieving sovereignty in 1918; even then, there still had to be discussions about gender equality for the best part of a century.

Today, we use words that are as new to the language as the words Jørgen used back then. The term “ocean acidification” was only coined in 2003, by the scientists Ken Caldeira and Michael E. Wickett. According to the media web registry Tímarit.is, this concept first appeared in print in Icelandic, súrnun hafsins, in the newspaper Morgunbladid on September 12, 2006. After that, it appeared once in 2007, never in 2008, and twice in 2009. By contrast, the word “profit,” hagnadur, came up 1,187 times in 2006 and 546 times in 2009, according to the same source. By 2011, the debate had developed only so far as to warrant five print occurrences of “ocean acidification.” “Kardashian” appeared 168 times. Ocean acidification is an example of a concept that has passed us by, although the phenomenon is one of the most significant changes in our planet’s chemistry and constitution over the last 30-50 million years.

What we are talking about is a fundamental change in ocean chemistry that could disrupt the entire ecosystem, a change so great that we might even taste the difference in the ocean, with its pH level expected to drop from pre-industrial revolution levels of 8.2 to 7.9 or even to 7.7. The difference between numbers on the pH scale is logarithmic; as a result, most people struggle to realize how vast the difference is between each integer. It is a poor fit for the frame of reference inside our heads. We similarly struggle to grasp that a 4.0 earthquake on the Richter scale is one hundred times larger than a 2.0.

Ocean acidification stems from the seas having soaked up about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide mankind has released into the atmosphere. If we look at fluctuations in ocean acidity from 25 million years ago to the present, we will see a number of smaller fluctuations, some of which lasted over hundreds of thousands of years. If things continue as expected, the next 100 years will see a vertical plunge in sea acidity, as though a meteorite has crashed into the earth. For the earth, 100 years is like a moment. “Ocean acidification.” I feel like I understand the words, but I probably don’t. “Ocean acidification” is as great and deep as all the oceans for all time. It is as vast as all the combined shoals of herring and sculpins, all the haddock and porpoises, the oysters, phytoplanktonand sperm whales; it is as massive as all the magnificent coral reefs with their turtles, brain corals and clownfish. The term “ocean acidification” might become so significant that it will be future generations’ dearest wish to be able to travel back in time and prevent the utter loss of paradise.

We inhabitants of Earth today are like the Icelanders during the time of the King of the Dog Days. It’s as if the words “acidification,” “melting,” “warming” and “rising” don’t elicit meaningful reactions the way “invasion,” “fire” and “virus” do. We read the news and watch documentaries, but for some reason, we keep to our daily routines.

Climate discussions are full of scientific concepts and complex statistics: 7.8 pH, 415 ppm. We must wrestle with aspects of chemistry, encountering words like aragonite, calcium saturation and atmospheric carbon dioxide activity. We do not feel a connection with years like 2050, 2100 and 2150, except when politicians make fuzzy plans to achieve a particular goal by, say, 2040. And maybe they’ll excuse themselves by saying that the forecasted end of the world was encrypted: 2100 is considered the year that aragonitic sub-saturation in the Arctic is expected to have a significant negative impact on calcium-forming organisms as ocean pH approaches 7.8 compared to the RCP 6.0 scenario outlined in the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Report.

The message in this passage should incite fear, but for most people, it is just jargon. Clauses like these should have a direct impact on politicians’ policies, on voting in elections. They put our system to the test: Can we get so deeply involved in the issues that we elect people to power who can steer the world in the right direction?

Earth’s mightiest forces have forsaken geological time and now change on a human scale. These changes surpass any of our previous experiences, surpass most of the language and metaphors we use to navigate our reality. Compare it to trying to record the sounds of a volcanic eruption. With most devices, the sound becomes muddled; nothing can be heard but white noise. For most people, the phrase “climate change” is just white noise. It’s easier to have opinions on smaller matters. We can comprehend the loss of something valuable, when an animal is shot, when a project blows past its agreed-upon budget. But when it comes to the infinitely large, the sacred, to things that are fundamental to our lives, there’s no comparable reaction. It’s as if the brain cannot register at such a scale.

This white noise deceives us. We see headlines and think we understand the words in them: “glacial melt,” “record heat,” “ocean acidification,” “increasing emissions.” If the scientists are right, these words indicate events more serious than anything that has happened in human history. If we fully understood such words, they’d directly alter our actions and choices. But it seems that, for most people, the words mean little.