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Abstract Focusing on the life and death of Okjökull, the first of Iceland's major glaciers to disappear because of anthropogenic climate change, this article discusses the complex relationships between cryospheres and human communities in Iceland. It asks how distinctions between non-living entities and living beings can offer insights to anthropology, and transdisciplinarily, as a model for recognising mutual precarities between the living and non-living world in the face of anthropogenic climate change. Detailing the authors’ ethnographic encounters with Ok mountain and Okjökull (glacier), the authors argue that by attending to non-living forms, and by registering their ‘passing’ or loss, we are able to document and better comprehend threshold events in the larger life of the planet. RésuméEn se concentrant sur la vie et la mort d'Okjökull, le premier des principaux glaciers islandais à disparaître en raison des changements climatiques anthropogéniques, cet article discute les relations complexes entre la cryosphère et les communautés humaines en Islande. Il questionne la manière dont les distinctions entre entités non vivantes et êtres vivants peuvent offrir des perspectives à l'anthropologie et la transdisciplinarité en tant que modèle pour reconnaitre des précarités mutuelles entre monde vivant et non vivant en face du changement climatique anthropogénique. En détaillant la rencontre ethnographique entre les auteurs, la montagne Ok et l'Okjökull (le glacier), les auteurs défendent l'idée qu'en prenant acte des formes non vivantes et en marquant leur « disparition » ou leur perte, nous sommes en mesure de documenter et de mieux comprendre les événements de bascule dans la vie de notre planète. 

From the vantage point of the social sciences, the article provides an overview of the author's concept, "hydrological globalization," as interconnective quality --both physical and social -- that is created through anthropogenic climate change and the transformation of the global cryosphere. The proposition forwarded in the article is that we can "follow the water" from sites of melt (such as The Arctic) to sites where melted ice has, and will, become sea level rise (largely in global coastal cities in the mid-latitudes) in order to compare and contrast strategies and commitments of response and adaptation to environmental change. Through the connectivity of the World Ocean, the essay proposes that novel, unlikely and distant relations are created through the deformation and reformation of the hydrosphere.