Glaciers around the world are melting so quickly that the scale of the loss is difficult to comprehend. Death, on the other hand, is a universal experience, familiar across all cultures. To bridge that gap, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe of Rice University are drawing parallels between human death rituals and the disappearance of glaciers, offering people a more tangible way to understand what’s being lost.
They’ve held funerals for glaciers, built a temporary glacier graveyard with headstones carved from ice, and launched the Global Glacier Casualty List – an online archive of stories and images documenting disappearing ice from the Alps to the Andes.
Yale Climate Connections spoke with the project’s creators about why memorializing glaciers matters and how these stories can inspire action.
This interview has been edited.
Yale Climate Connections: Why is it important to look at each glacier as having its own personality and to recognize each one individually when it’s gone?
Dominic Boyer: The world loses 273 billion tons of glacial ice each year. That’s a staggering figure, a lot of zeros, right? And at the same time, it’s really hard for anyone to understand what 273 billion tons of ice really means. It’s so abstract, it becomes kind of experientially alienating for people to even try to imagine that. But glaciers have a lot of animate features: They have been named because they move, make sounds, and have distinctive smells. And human communities both depend upon glaciers and are also vulnerable to glaciers in times of climate change – they live downstream from them, use their water, or could be threatened by a destabilizing flood.
And so, one of the things we’ve tried to do is to bring the destabilization and loss of the world’s glaciers down to more of a human scale, down to a level where people are more able to emotionally connect to this phenomenon. Because we think if people emotionally connect to it, they’re more likely to be motivated to make changes – or to pressure policymakers to make changes – that are necessary to help slow down the loss of the world’s glaciers.
YCC: What inspired you to hold a funeral for a glacier?
Boyer: People understand a funeral; they understand what it means to lose someone. And death rituals are about as close to a human universal as you can get culturally – almost every society that we know of has had some kind of a death ritual – so it’s a way that humans come together as communities to mark the passage of time and to recommit to living together communally after the loss of a loved one.
Cymene Howe: We hosted the first funeral for a glacier in Iceland back in 2019, and that was for Okjökull or Ok Glacier, which was a little glacier, but a named glacier that had died in Iceland to little fanfare, and the world had essentially shrugged. We felt that Okjökull, even though it was a small glacier, deserved more recognition, and so we created a memorial for Okjökull on top of Ok Mountain, along with some collaborators from Iceland, and hosted this first funeral for a glacier.
But we wanted to expand the global understanding that glaciers almost everywhere on Earth – and almost every glacier on Earth – is in fact dying or critically endangered because of the climate crisis, so we held the glacier graveyard in the summer of 2024. We worked with an Icelandic ice carver to create individual headstones that were all created from ice. And then we created this graveyard with 15 glaciers that have either died or are in danger of dying very soon out on the peninsula near Reykjavik. We [had] representatives of the glaciers of Kilimanjaro from the African continent, of Sarenne, which is a glacier that died recently in the French Alps, glaciers of Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico. And we [held a ceremony with] eulogies for each of these glaciers, and an Icelandic funeral choir. We hoped that this would create a symbolic way of recognizing the loss of glaciers and their importance in the world to us all.
YCC: Why did you create the Global Glacier Casualty List?
Howe: We’re gathering the stories and the reflections from people who live near glaciers, work with glaciers, or are really directly affected by glaciers and their transformation in these times of climate crisis. So for them, glaciers are not abstract bodies of ice, but they are sources of water, sources of folk tales and history and origin stories – sometimes going back to the beginning of human settlements in these regions. Several stories are from Indigenous communities who value these glaciers in ways that are different from the way people focused on the Western, or scientific, side might. And with an online platform, we’re able to more effectively network and collaborate with people all over the world and share this resource globally.
The other advantage of this interactive website for the Global Glacier Casualty List is that you can scroll over the globe, zoom in, and fly down to certain glaciers. If you want to go look at the glaciers of the Alps, Andes, Africa, the Himalayas, you can track over to those places and actually see what it’s like to be on the ground next to the place where that glacier was – or where it’s currently disappearing. So you can get this what we’ll call a street view of that mountainous region, and you can see the rivers moving, and the grassy areas, and the rock slides, and all of the different dimensions that are available from the satellite imaging. And so there’s a really robust diversity of stories here, a set of images, and then of course the ability to be able to literally move around the globe and see in a very visual way how glaciers have been everywhere and they are everywhere melting away.
YCC: Are there any stories that stood out to you in putting this all together?
Boyer: The Swiss have been extraordinarily good at using the loss of glaciers to push towards meaningful reforms in terms of climate policy, and the [group behind the Swiss] Glacier Initiative staged a funeral for the Pizol Glacier, complete with people in traditional Swiss funeral garb and alphorns. The Glacier Initiative was one of the catalysts for the signing of a Swiss climate law a few years ago that set binding targets for the government to follow to decarbonize their economy. And so Pizol died a hero, a sacrifice towards this greater effort to save some of Switzerland’s glaciers through concerted effort in Switzerland. And of course, Switzerland cannot do this on its own; it has to be a global movement, but the fact that this glacier directly contributed something towards a better climate policy in Switzerland, I think, is a great story.
Howe: The Pico Humboldt Glacier was the last of Venezuela’s five mountain glaciers to die and to disappear, and there’s a really enchanting story that goes along with Venezuela’s glaciers: Back in the beginning of time, when the first people arrived in the part of the country that’s now called Venezuela, they settled near the base of these mountains, and a princess saw these astounding, huge white eagles flying across the sky. And she chased them across the horizon until they finally landed on the tops of the highest mountain peaks of the mountain range. And those five white eagles landed on the mountain peaks, and they folded their giant white wings, and there they froze into place and became the glaciers that topped the mountain ranges of Venezuela. And now, the [Venezuelan] people remember the story, but the glaciers are gone, and the eagles are gone, and all that remains is the tale of this princess in her quest to find the magical eagles and to see those glaciers set in place. So in one sense, it is a sad story of loss, but in another sense, it is a powerful story of remembering how things began, how things can end, how human beings are there to witness, and to understand, and to feel those changes, those transformations, and those losses.
There is an opportunity for us to preserve many of the glaciers that still reside on Earth, and so the story of Venezuela – a country that’s lost all its glaciers – does not need to be the story of every country on Earth. There is an opportunity for us to collectively work together to preserve the world’s glaciers.
And that’s precisely why the United Nations has declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. We know that if we are able to keep to the Paris Accords – or very close to them – we can preserve much more of the glacial mass than we are currently on track to do. We’re currently on track to destroy about 75% of all of the glaciers on Earth, which, of course, is catastrophic in terms of sea level rise, freshwater availability, agricultural resources for communities that live near these glaciers, and in the transformation of the world’s weather and climate systems. So there is much that we can save, and there is much reason to save these glaciers that have inhabited our planet for so many millennia. And seeing these stories is a reminder to all of us that we have a responsibility – and also a way to move forward – to do that.
YCC: How has the process of putting together all of these different stories affected you personally?
Boyer: This project is about bringing the loss of the world’s glaciers down to a level where humans can comprehend it better, and, hopefully, act more effectively and rapidly to reverse this trajectory. So you go through a full emotional spectrum in working on these stories. On the one hand, you’re very happy to be able to bring new stories to light – there’s something that’s quite invigorating and even joyous about telling stories. When we did the funeral for Okjökull, it didn’t feel like a dour, despondent event; it felt more like an Irish wake, because funerals aren’t really for the dead people – they’re for the living, and it’s a chance for the living to gather together and to connect and to commit to keep living together. There’s a full range – in any human experience – of emotional possibilities from sadness to joy, and that’s also true in the time of climate change. If we don’t open ourselves to the possibility of a future with joy in it, it’s much harder to get people to take these matters seriously.
Howe: Doing this work and learning from glaciologists and from people who live near and with glaciers has been a true and extraordinary treat and special time in my life. But we have been working on this topic for several years now, and it can be quite disheartening to see the failure to move forward on the policies, the actions, and the decarbonization that we need. When I let it sink in, it can be really heartbreaking.
That said, the joy is there too, to keep on doing the work, and I wake up every morning hoping to make a little tiny difference however I can. It always feels really incremental and like it’s never enough, but if all of us put in time and effort, then eventually at one point – in one moment – it will be enough to make a difference.
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