We’re up to the 7th chapter of The A-Z of Iceland and finally I’m mentioning the ice! For Iceland does have ice, even in the heights of summer, in the form of several glaciers.
Today, Iceland is about 11% glaciers. When Flóki Vilgerðarson named the country, fed up to the back teeth with ice and snow, it was merely winter although I imagine the glaciers were more extensive in his day.
A glacier, if you’re not sure, is a huge frozen mass. It’s where last year’s snow didn’t melt so this year’s is piling on top of it and anyway, last year’s snow settled on top of the year before’s and so on. Eventually the snow becomes heavy and it’s its own weight that compresses it and turns it into a glacier. That same weight makes it a bit wobbly and it starts sliding off whatever it’s formed on – usually high places. It’s not like an ice river. It’s more like a slow-motion cliff collapse. As it falls, it starts to bend inside, as it runs into solid rock walls it starts to bend (well, sometimes. Sometimes it just pushes its way through like an overgrown nail file). Fresh snow on top disguises all the cracks that start to form on the inside. And a glacier can reach incredible thicknesses. Mýrdalsjökull has an average depth of 200m and reaches 740m at its thickest point – that’s the best part of half a mile. You don’t want to fall half a mile down a crack in the ice.
You can go and play on several of Iceland’s glaciers. Go with a local guide, there are plenty of them, they know how to make sure you don’t fall into a crevasse. I’ve been hiking on Mýrdalsjökull a couple of times. One of its tongues comes almost down to the Ring Road so it’s an easy trip. You get crampons and an axe and go stomping over this vast bit of ice – and at this point, you’re only seeing the very bottom of the thinnest ribbon of glacier sliding off the bottom of the mountain.
Because it’s so easily accessible, you see a lot of independent tourists playing on it, especially kids and the kind of “too good and self-important to use a guide”. I so vividly remember watching them on a convenient slidey bit where you could scramble up an ice-boulder and slide back down. I remember this particularly vividly because our guide, Dóri, went and jabbed at the patch of ice where they were landing with the walking end of his axe. Half an inch of ice broke revealing an abyss underneath. In that particular case, the hole was only big enough to lose a single foot, not your whole body but you don’t know where else you’re protected from a drop into frozen hell by a paper-thin slice of ice. Don’t mess around on glaciers without an expert. Just don’t.
Anyway. Hiking on Mýrdalsjökull is very interesting. Iceland’s glaciers are generally striped on blue and white, the blue being where the thicker heavier winter snow has compressed itself so well that it’s squeezed all the air bubbles out, which is what bounces light around and makes ice look white. But Mýrdalsjökull is right next to our old friend Eyjafjallajökull and between its blue and white stripes are layers of black ash, flung from the volcano next door. It’s a very striking mix.
And then there’s Katla. Katla is the beast beneath, the enormous, unpredictable and overdue volcano lurking underneath Mýrdalsjökull. She’s ten times the size of Eyjafjallajökull (hereafter called E15), ten times the power and has a lot more ice on top. It’s glacier + volcano that makes that catastrophic ash cloud we all remember so well, the mass of ice suddenly being superheated and taking off with fragments of semi-cooled lava. If, when, Katla erupts, she’s going to cause air traffic chaos.
E15 is Iceland’s most infamous glacier. Vatnajökull is its most spectacular. It’s the second biggest glacier in Europe, if you count the Severny Island ice cap in Russia as Europe. Vatnajökull occupies a huge part of the entire south-eastern quarter of Iceland. It’s got several volcanoes underneath it, one of which erupted in 2011, a year after E15 and no, you didn’t hear about it. It didn’t break through the ice so all it did was melt a little bowl of water around the vent which sundew flowed out from under the glacier.
I make that sound delicate and gentle. It’s not. It’s called a jökulhraup, a glacial flood, and it’s the principle danger in Iceland. Very few volcanoes offer much danger from lava and messy ashy things like E15 are rare. It’s the floods that rip away roads and bridges, tear off boulders the size of houses and fling them across the landscape and punch holes through the size of mountains. There’s so much water contained in the glaciers.
Finally, there’s Jökulsárlón, the famous glacier lagoon. It’s where one of Vatnajökull’s tongues reaches the land. It scraped out a big deep bowl as it retreated and that bowl is now full of meltwater and icebergs that have calved off the snout of the glacier. It’s been in the news this week after some tourists got a bit close to a wave caused by calving ice. It’s spectacularly beautiful, especially in the sun. Again, dangerous. See the aforementioned wave. Also, the floating icebergs often flip themselves over with no warning. Go out on a boat trip to see it up close. Pick the right boat trip and you might even get waffles and jam thrown in.
I said earlier on that you can play on the glaciers – with the correct expert. Well, you can hike and try ice-climbing on Mýrdalsjökull and Vatnajökull. You can snowmobile on Mýrdalsjökull and Langjökull. You can go inside the glacier at Langjökull. You can do monster truck tours on some – can’t remember which. There are helicopter tours that will drop you gently on top to admire the view. I think there may even be a dogsledding guide on one of them. Just pack warmly. Glaciers are nature’s air conditioning, as you’ll know if you’ve ever camped at Skaftafell.
