British artist installs phone link to dying glacier

By Avril Ormsby

LONDON, June 8 (Reuters Life!) - The creaking and splashing sounds of Europe's largest glacier slipping into an ocean grave are just a phone call away now that an artist has installed a microphone in its surrounding waters.

Glaswegian artist Katie Paterson was moved to set up the line after hallucinating about Iceland's giant Vatnajokull glacier during a bout of fever.

The link encourages people to connect emotionally with the glacier, she told Reuters from her tent on the Icelandic shoreline.

"It is really poetic: a river of ice slowly disintegrating, quite discreetly, quite invisibly. Sheets of ice are constantly slipping off, huge bits cracking, moving very slowly.

"It is sad to see a vanishing world."

Paterson, a final year student at Slade School of Art in London, decided to use the phone line after fever-induced hallucinations during a previous trip to Iceland.

The 25-year-old imagined that the liters of water she drank during recovery were making her feel part of the nearby glacier which supplied the water.

Climate change is having a damaging affect on Vatnajokull but the project is more about the glacier's grandeur slipping away, she said.