Random Glacier Name Generator

How this random glacier generator works

Press Generate and you get a glacier and the country it is in. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Aletsch in Switzerland. Perito Moreno in Argentina. Vatnajökull in Iceland. Fox and Franz Josef in New Zealand. Athabasca in Canada. Hubbard in Alaska.

Every one of them is moving, right now, while you read this. That is not a poetic flourish. It is the definition, and it is the reason a glacier can die.

A glacier is not ice. It is ice that moves.

Pile up snow. Pile up more. The snow at the bottom is crushed by the weight above it, the air is squeezed out, and the crystals fuse into solid glacial ice.

Keep piling. At around 40 to 50 metres thick, something changes. The ice at the bottom can no longer hold its own shape. Under that much pressure ice stops behaving like a brittle solid and begins to deform, slowly, and the whole mass creeps downhill.

That is a glacier. Not a big patch of ice. A body of ice thick enough to flow.

Everything glaciers do to the landscape follows from that one property. They carve U-shaped valleys because they are rivers with no give in them. They leave moraines because they are conveyor belts carrying rubble. They calve icebergs because a thing that flows into the sea has to end somewhere.

And it means a glacier can stop being one. Thin the ice below the threshold and it stops flowing. What is left is not a small glacier. It is dead ice.

The first glacier to be declared dead had a funeral

On top of a shield volcano in western Iceland there used to be a glacier called Okjökull. Ok is the volcano. Jökull is the Icelandic word for glacier.

Around 1890 it covered roughly 16 square kilometres and was about fifty metres thick. By 2012 it covered less than one.

In 2014 the glaciologist Oddur Sigurðsson made a determination and wrote it down: the ice was too thin to move under its own weight. It was no longer a living glacier. It was dead ice. Okjökull was struck off.

Five years later, on 18 August 2019, around a hundred people walked two hours up the mountain and fixed a bronze plaque to a bare rock where the ice had been. The inscription is titled "A letter to the future", and it addresses whoever reads it in two hundred years.

At the bottom of the plaque is a number: 415 ppm, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the month it was written.

Where the glacier was, there is now a small lake.

What it means to be struck off

Being struck off is not a metaphor and it is not a ceremony. It is a scientific determination with a threshold, and Okjökull failed it.

Which is a very strange kind of death. Nothing was destroyed. The ice is largely still there in some form, as meltwater in the lake and vapour in the air. What ended was the motion, and the motion was the thing that made it a glacier rather than a large cold object.

Iceland has more than four hundred glaciers and loses something in the order of eleven billion tonnes of ice a year. Every one of them is on the same trajectory, at a different point along it.

Glaciers are the largest reserve of fresh water on the planet, and frozen inside them is a record of the atmosphere going back hundreds of thousands of years. When one goes, both go. The water leaves, and so does the archive.

Okjökull was the first to be formally declared dead. It will not be the last, and the process is now well understood, which is its own quiet kind of horror.

Icefield, ice cap, icefjord

Not all ice is a glacier, and the vocabulary is worth having.

An ice cap is a dome of ice that buries the land beneath it. An icefield is similar but does not fully bury the terrain, so peaks poke through. Both are reservoirs. The glaciers are the tongues that flow out of them.

An icefjord, such as Ilulissat in Greenland, is not ice at all. It is the fjord that a glacier calves into, choked with the icebergs that glacier produces.

And Mer de Glace in France means "sea of ice". A glacier that does not need the word, because it already has a better one.

There is a joke hiding in the Icelandic names too. Jökull means glacier, so "Vatnajökull Glacier" says glacier twice, the way "the River Avon" says river twice and "Sahara Desert" says desert twice. Every language does this to the languages it borrowed from.

Ways people actually use this

• Geography teaching. Generate five and ask what landform each one is currently building. The answers are moraines, fjords and lakes.
• Travel planning. Several of these are receding fast enough that the walk to the ice gets longer every year.
• Quizzes. Show the glacier, ask for the country. Jostedalsbreen catches everyone.
• Naming things. Aletsch, Baltoro and Perito Moreno all sound like they mean business.
• Learning the word jökull. Once you have it, half of Iceland's map becomes readable.

Getting more out of the filters

• Every entry is written as "Name, Country", so Contains doubles as a country filter. Type Norway, Iceland, Alaska.
• Type jökull into Contains for the Icelandic entries whose names already say glacier.
• Ends with ignores the country and reads the last letter of the glacier's own name, so r returns the ones that end in "Glacier".
• Starts with matches the glacier's own name, since that comes first.

Questions people ask

What makes something a glacier?

Movement. The ice has to be thick enough, roughly forty to fifty metres, that it deforms under its own weight and flows downhill. Ice that has stopped moving is not a glacier, it is dead ice.

Can a glacier die?

Yes, and there is a formal process for saying so. Okjökull in Iceland was stripped of its glacier status in 2014 because it had grown too thin to move. A memorial plaque was installed at the site in 2019.

How fast do glaciers move?

Most creep at metres per year. Some surge at metres per day. The speed depends on thickness, slope, temperature, and how much meltwater is lubricating the base.

What is the difference between a glacier and an ice cap?

An ice cap is a dome of ice covering the land beneath it. Glaciers are the flowing tongues that drain out of it. An icefield is similar but does not fully bury the terrain.

How much of the world's fresh water is in glaciers?

The great majority of it. Glaciers and ice sheets are by far the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet, which is why their decline is a water supply question as much as a sea level one.

References

1. Okjökull
2. Iceland commemorates a glacier lost to climate change
3. Iceland bids farewell to its first lost glacier