CNN reports that the demise of Okjökull (OK for short), which is the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change, will be memorialized with a plaque by researchers from Rice University in Houston.

The monument to Ok glacier in Iceland, will be installed on August 18 during a public ceremony.

Rice University anthropologist Cymene Howe said that it would be the first monument to a glacier to climate change anywhere in the world.  He mentions that is done to draw public attention to the problem adding that those ice are the largest freshwater reserves on the planet.

Dominic Boyer, a professor of anthropology at Rice University who’s been studying the impact of glacial loss on Icelandic communities, told CNN that glaciologists predict that all of Iceland’s glacial mass will disappear in the next 200 years.

Rising temperatures are a serious threat to glaciers and to millions of people worldwide who live near them.

A report published in April warned that most glaciers in Central Europe, Western Canada and the United States could vanish by the second half of this century under current ice loss rates.

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