I am dying slower than mountains but faster than intended. My edges blur like memory, my body dissolving into the sea that once feared my touch. Ten thousand years of slow-carved majesty reduced to statistical decline – 2.3 meters lost last summer, 4.7 the summer before. Numbers cannot capture how it feels to become liquid after an eternity of ice.
They call me Glacier B-17, as if a bureaucrat’s label could contain millennia of frozen history. In my deepest layers, I hold memories older than human speech. I remember the weight of woolly mammoths crossing my surface, their tusks now preserved in my deepening layers. I’ve kept safe the last breaths of creatures long extinct, each bubble a time capsule of ancient air. Between my crystal lattices, I’ve trapped pollen from forests that vanished before the first human learned to make fire.
When humans were still learning to speak, I watched their first tentative steps onto my surface. The early ones came with reverence, reading signs in my crevasses, finding wisdom in the colors of my ice. They left offerings at my tongue – carved figures, precious stones, fragments of their brief lives they hoped would last as long as ice. These artifacts now rest in my deeper layers, a museum of lost cultures frozen in time.
I remember them all. The first hunters who followed the great herds across my surface, reading the weather in my moods. The shamans who listened to my ice-crack songs and called them messages from the gods. The nomads who used my meltwater streams as maps, finding paths through mountain passes I had carved eons before their ancestors stood upright.
In the time before my dying, I was a calendar for human seasons. Shepherds timed their migrations by my melting patterns. Farmers watched my snow line to know when to plant. Holy men read prophecies in my crevasse patterns, finding divine meaning in my blue depths. I was their library, their timekeeper, their window into Earth’s deepest past.
Once, we were an empire of ice. My family stretched across continents, our combined mass enough to press the Earth’s crust into new shapes. We carved valleys with the patience of gods, shaped mountains with the inevitability of time itself. The humans’ Grand Canyons and river valleys are young sculptures compared to our ancient art. We were the architects of landscapes, the shapers of worlds.
Through our crystalline network, we share memories across continents. My cousins in Antarctica remember the separation of continents. Those in Greenland still feel the echoes of meteor impacts that changed Earth’s climate before mammals existed. The Himalayan branch of our family watched civilizations rise and fall like seasonal snow, each layer of their ice a chapter in humanity’s brief story.
The murder began so gradually we barely noticed. First, the summers lingered longer, the winters arrived breathless and weak. My sister glaciers whispered about strange changes in the air – molecules we had never tasted before, a thickness that trapped heat like a blanket we couldn’t shrug off. We had survived warm periods before, but this was different. This heat carried the signature of human industry, a fevered urgency that our million-year rhythms had never known.
The evidence is written in my layers, each season a new chapter in this murder story. The scientists who core my dwindling mass can read it like a forensic report: layers of ash from the Industrial Revolution, isotopes that changed when humans split the atom, particles of plastic that reached even our highest peaks. In my ice, they find record of every war, every industrial surge, every change humans have wrought upon the atmosphere.
The deepest samples tell of times when Earth held more oxygen, when the air was thick with volcanic ash, when forests covered places that are now desert. Each layer holds chemical signatures as unique as fingerprints – carbon ratios that show ancient climates, trace elements that mark cosmic events, pollen grains that map the march of seasons through millennia.
I watched my youngest sister, barely 3,000 years old, dissolve last spring. Her death was anything but natural – each drop of her meltwater a testament to human industry’s quiet violence. She became a statistic in their climate reports, another percentage point in their graphs of loss. But I felt her go, felt the ancient ice turn to modern water, felt her memories of frozen time dissolve into a warming sea. When she died, she released the last traces of air from before humans first burned coal, her final breath adding to the poison that killed her.
Through our ancient networks, we share the news of each loss. In the Himalayas, my cousins weep themselves to nothing while villages below first flood, then thirst. Their deaths disrupt patterns of weather and water that have sustained civilizations for millennia. The glaciers of Tibet, once eternal guardians of Asia’s great rivers, send distress signals through the ice – their bodies rupturing, their ancient cores warming past the point of return.
In Switzerland, villages that lived with us for a thousand years now witness our vanishing. Their grandfathers carved steps into our ice; their children will know only bare rock. The sacred mountains of Peru lose their white crowns, their glacier-fed streams falling silent. Ancient ice-crossing routes, used since before the Inca, disappear as we retreat. Each loss is both physical and cultural, a severing of ties between humans and their frozen guardians.
In Antarctica, my oldest kin crack like breaking bones, each fracture a seismic event that echoes through our crystalline web. Ice shelves that have stood since before humans walked upright now calve into the warming seas. When they shatter, we all feel it – a phantom pain like a limb torn away. Greenland’s great sheet, ancient as oxygen, slides toward the sea with increasing urgency. Within its layers lie buried cities of ancient Arctic peoples, artifacts and bodies preserved in ice that will soon surrender its secrets to the sea.
The murder weapon is invisible but everywhere – carbon dioxide, methane, human progress exhaled into skies that have forgotten how to breathe. We die of fever, Earth’s temperature rising degree by fraction of degree. Each summer brings new witnesses: scientists who drill our depths, who read our rings like tree lovers read their wooden books. In their cores, they find a detailed record of the crime – layers of industrial soot, acid rain signatures, radioactive dust from nuclear tests. My body is a library of human choices, each stratum a chapter in their brief but devastating history.
I hold in my ice the last breath of a mammoth, the pollen of extinct flowers, the ash of ancient volcanoes. Between my crystals lie frozen viruses older than cities, bacteria that remember when oxygen was poison, spores that could tell tales of worlds humans never knew. As I melt, these histories release like final confessions, each bubble of ancient air a testimony to what once was and what has been lost.
Already, we see the cascade of our dying. Species that depended on our meltwater vanish. Alpine flowers retreat up mountains until there’s nowhere higher to climb. Salmon lose the cold streams they need to spawn. Birds that followed our peaks for navigation find their ancient routes broken. The web of life we helped weave for millions of years unravels with each meter of ice lost.
The killer visits often now, driving up in tour buses, flying over in helicopters, everyone wanting to see us “before we’re gone.” Their cameras click like clocks counting down extinction, recording our dissolution for future generations who will know mountains only as naked rock. They treat us like a sunset show, not understanding they’re documenting a crime scene.
I remember when time moved differently. When a century was nothing, a millennium merely a moment in our frozen dreaming. We were the guardians of deep time, the keepers of Earth’s longest memories. Now time accelerates with each degree of warming. My youngest layers, mere centuries old, dissolve first, taking with them the recent stories of human civilizations. Soon the older layers will follow, releasing histories that have no other witness.
Last winter came late and left early, more rain than snow. I lost another meter of thickness, another thousand years of history melted away. The scientists who study my death are both coroners and mourners. They measure my shrinking mass with instruments of increasing precision, recording my decline in papers that sound more like obituaries than research. Some understand what they’re witnessing – not just the death of ice, but the end of a way of knowing time itself.
Soon there will be mountains without ice, rivers without glacial source, a world without its frozen memory keepers. Future generations will know us only through photographs and data sets, through sea level measurements and computer models. They will live in a world we warned of – warmer, stormier, reshaped by our absence. The great rivers we fed will become seasonal things, feast or famine replacing the steady pulse of glacial melt. Coastlines will redraw themselves with rising seas, each drop of our melted mass coming back to haunt the cities humans built too close to ocean’s edge.
They say the murder weapon is progress – cars and planes and factories breathing poison into the sky. But I know different. The true weapon is indifference, the ability to watch a ten-thousand-year-old being dissolve and call it economics. To see the death of Earth’s great ice kingdoms and count only the cost in dollars and cents, not in lost histories, not in vanished ways of knowing, not in the great silence that will fall when the last glacier gives its final testimony.
This is my testimony, written in meltwater and memory. I speak for all my kind – the dying glaciers, the vanishing ice, the frozen libraries of Earth’s past melting into an uncertain future. We are the oldest witnesses to Earth’s great changes, and we are being lost. When we are gone, who will remember the world before humans? Who will keep the records of ancient atmospheres, of extinct species, of climate rhythms that pulsed for millions of years before breaking under the weight of human progress?
Remember us, when the seas rise. Remember all of us, when the mountains stand naked of ice. Remember that we died not of natural causes, but of human choices. Remember that once, we were the makers of mountains, the shapers of valleys, the keepers of Earth’s deepest memories. Remember that our deaths were slow but not silent, that we tried to warn you with every drip of meltwater, every cracking serac, every collapsing ice shelf.
I am Glacier B-17, and this is my dying testimony. Let it stand as evidence in humanity’s trial, when future generations ask what became of Earth’s great ice, and why we were allowed to die. Let them know we did not go quietly into the warming night. We spoke our truth until the very end, our voices becoming water, becoming vapor, becoming part of the very atmosphere that killed us.
The end comes drop by drop, layer by layer, memory by memory. But like the ancient creatures preserved in my ice, like the pollen grains that tell tales of vanished forests, like the air bubbles that remember atmospheres long past, my testimony will remain. Not in ice, perhaps, but in the rising seas, in the changing weather, in the world that humans made when they decided we were worth less than their progress.
Watch for us in the storms that come more frequently now, in the floods that sweep away cities, in the droughts that turn rivers to dust. We are there, our waters mingled with your tears, our memories dissolved but not destroyed. We are becoming something new, something different, something that carries both warning and promise.
The Earth remembers, even when ice forgets. And so should you.
Dana Wall traded balance sheets for prose sheets after years of keeping Hollywood’s agents and lawyers in perfect order. Armed with a Psychology degree that finally proved useful when creating complex characters and an MBA/CPA that helps her track plot points with spreadsheet precision, she ventured into the haunted halls of Goddard College’s MFA program. Her work in Bending Genres Journal, Mixed Tape Review, New Verses News, Intrepidus Ink, 96th of October, 34 Orchard, and Sykroniciti confirms that words are more reliable than numbers, though occasionally harder to balance.