..
The glacier, Solheimajokull, a tongue of ice reaching toward Iceland's southeast coast, has become an apologue of climate change in recent years: retreating an average of one Olympic-pool length every year for the past two decades due to climbing temperatures, warming ocean currents and disrupted seasons.
Crouching under 90-mile-an-hour gusts on a stormy autumn day, visitors to Solheimajokull see a rash of dirt cones poking through grey-streaked snow, while piles of rocks, gravel moraines, and a now empty glacial bed about a half-mile away attest to the former reach of this dying giant.
Iceland, lying just below the Arctic Circle, is one of the fastest-warming places on the planetas much as four times the Northern Hemisphere average. The 300-some glaciers that cover more than 10 percent of the island are losing an average of 11 billion tons of ice a year.
The annual volume carried away from Iceland's glaciers and not replaced by new snow would fill 50 of the world's largest trucks every minute for the entire year.
'Highest losses on Earth'
"It is among the highest losses on the Earth," pioneering glaciologist Helgi Bjornsson said during an interview in his office at the University of Iceland's Institute of Earth Sciences, overflowing with 40 years of research and books about ice.
Subject of ancient myth, a proud literary tradition and a lucrative tourist draw, Iceland's majestic white mountainsjökull in Icelandicare crucial to the nation today. Glacial rivers generate hydropower that provides most of the country's electricity. Glacier ice stores water for its 320,000 residents.
Some of the country's glaciers have vanished already and several others will be gone within a decade or two, said Bjornsson, one of the leading scientists to quantify the link between glacial loss and greenhouse gas-induced warming.
A generation from now, there may not be enough water to drive turbines or slake a nation's thirst. Dust storms will swirl over dry glacier beds while huge expanses of exposed earth erode.
Without glaciers, one resident quipped, Iceland is "just land".
Happening now
Effects are already beginning to appear. Bjornsson tells of Iceland's longest bridge, a half-mile span over the Skeidara River, which drains from the massive Vatnajokull ice cap down to the island's south coast.
"A few years ago, the river disappeared, and now this bridge, the longest bridge in Iceland, is just standing there and there's no water underneath it," he said. "So it looks like we are crazy here in Iceland."
