Iceland - Topic of Choice

During the summer of 2022, I attended an environmental encounters trip to Iceland with Dr. Kip Redick, Dr. Joe Balay, and 14 other students. It was a two week trip, but those short two weeks completely changed my life. I learned about more things than I thought was possible in 14 days, and I've never been more interested in learning before. It completely opened my eyes to a whole new perspective, on how the world should live, and what the environment should look like. Everyone was so kind, and they are the most environmental conservative countries. 
While there, we did many different activities, including hiking on a glacier. It was so fun, but exhausting and kind of sad at the same time. It was obvious to see how much the glacier have had melted in the past years due to global warming, as there was a large glacial lake at the bottom with melted ice, and the glacier was all rock and sediment before we got to the actual ice, showing how much it had melted. It was sad, because as I was talking to our glacial hike tour guide, he said that Iceland is expecting that specific glacier to be gone within the next 50 years. 
I later did my final essay for the iceland trip on the implications of glacial melting, as that hike really stuck with me, and made me pretty sad. Doing research for the essay taught me a lot about glaciers, and how important they really are. The melting of glaciers is causing extreme issues, including extreme sea level rise, the endangerment of different species, economic issues, etc.... 
It is really upsetting because people don't know how important glaciers truly are, and how beautiful they are. 

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