Day 8 - Iceland

We rounded the final turn today and are coming down the home stretch. The scene you see above was found at our first stop, Jokulsarlon. It is here that a glacier has retreated about 5km in 70 years. What it has left behind is two things. One is access to the Ring Road. The glacier used to run right up to the black sand beach making it very hard to get to Reykjavik from all points east. Second, a very deep lagoon filled with icebergs has formed. Just another eye popping scene provided by Iceland's Route 1. These icebergs break off the glacier, float around the lagoon for a few years losing mass, then float out to sea and melt away. See, global warming has its good points.

We took a duck boat out into the lagoon and learned all sorts of fun facts about glacial ice. (Its 1500 hundred years old. Its 5x more dense than normal ice - making it perfect for drinks as it takes longer to melt. 90% (!) of each glacier is underwater.) As the boat petered around the lagoon, Teri and I gawked and chatted up the guide. It was quite an experience.

When we got off the boat we wandered down to the beach. The black sand was littered with boulder sized chunks of ice that looked like someone casually dropped billions of dollars worth of diamonds all over. The contrast in color was almost as striking as the fact that Teri and I were standing on a black sand beach in Iceland surrounded by icebergs at the base of a glacier. WTF, mate?

From there we moved on to the gateway to the Skaftafell National Park. We weren't able to venture too far in because our little toy wind up car can't go off-roading. However, the information center offered a great hike up to a glacier, and fantastic video of the massive volcanic eruption in 1996.

See, in September 1996 there was a major earthquake followed by a volcanic eruption underneath the Vatnajokull glacier at Grimvotn. Over the next couple of days there was a 10km high cloud of steam that shot up in the air. Then the glacier began to cave in along the caldera as the lava below melted the ice at a rate of 5000m3/second. This unbelievable amount of water began to collect in a lake under the glacier, pushing it up from the bottom. After nearly six weeks, in early November, this lake burst through the glacier on the southern side of the glacier and rushed toward the sea. Ice chunks the size of three story buildings floated like they were sticks in a river. A 900m bridge was broken and twisted, then disappeared in the sea. Anything in the way of this 20km wide "jokulhlaup" was pushed to sea. When the glacier was sufficiently drained, all that was left below was a few more streams running through the sandur (huge, flat, barren, wasteland of rocks and debris). See if you can find any of the video on you tube. The entire process was filmed by aroused geologists with video footage justifying and proving their lifetime of research.

After learning about the massive river that went running down the glacier, we decided to go check it out. Our short hike ended at the base of one finger of this ice giant. Because of the cloud cover, the ice, water, and sky all blended together as the same dirty white color. Except for the green lichen, the view looked like an Ansel Adams photo. Our pictures however do not.

We finished our day with a trek across another sandur, then behind some large green plateaus and ended at the beach side town of Vik. Cliffs are rising above the town on all sides and there is a rock formation out in the water that looks like a church organ. There are only 290 people that live here and the town church sits above, looking over them. This is also the safest place to run to in case the volcano on the glacier above the town erupts again. If it happens tonight, we'll only have 25 minutes to get to the high ground. Hope to talk to you all tomorrow.