Jokulsarlon
Our first full on view of Jokulsarlon, as we pull the car into the parking lot is so amazing, that I actually feel like I might cry just from looking at it. The water is an arctic blue, and the broken pieces of the glacier are startlingly white. Some are streaked with contrasting black lines of ash, and the tips where some are melting appear to glow a greenish blue in the sunlight.
They are strewn about as far as your eyes can see, and even though I had seen pictures of this before, there is nothing that could have prepared me for how it looks when it is actually in front of you.
We get out of the car, and the air is so fresh and crisp and cold - it feels like the universe has left the refrigerator door open. Up close, the sight in front of you seems almost unreal - it must be manufactured, Vegas came to town and made these shapes out of Styrofoam to lure you into the casino or something - but it’s not.
I thought that being on a glacier would be like the planet Hoth from the start of Empire Strikes back, or the part of The Left Hand of Darkness where they decide to run over the ice. Pretty much all my expectations of Iceland are now that it can only be compared to other planets / fictional worlds. Trying to compare it to other things on Earth seems totally unfair. It’s in another league entirely.
At any rate, being on the melting glacier is not like either of these things. It is cold, but it doesn’t have a frozen sort of static beauty. It’s very mobile and alive - the wind is cutting, chunks of ice are crashing into the bay, birds are wheeling around overhead, and you can make out a few boats in the distance on the water.
After walking around a bit in complete awe, we go into to the small shop where you can purchase tickets for a boat tour and buy tickets for a boat tour. We had wanted the zodiac boat, which is like an inflatable raft with a motor on it, but the zodiac boat has broken, and its passengers are being evacuated while we wait. We opt for the not-broken amphibious boat tour instead.
Although the ice was amazing, just viewing it from shore, being out among the formations is another experience entirely. You can see such detail up close - especially the texture of the ice, and the way the sun makes some of the ice pieces seem luminous when they are right in front of you.
To me, it doesn’t look like something that is melting. It looks like a frozen kingdom, like some ancient Norse myth in which an entire city gets hit with a freezing ray by one of the gods. Some parts of it look like the pieces of an enormous frozen chess set. And because it is all melting, if you saw this another summer, or even a week later, it would not look the same. The formations are ever shifting and changing. Some of the pieces we can see melting right in front of us.
Because the glacier that is melting is so big, the lake that we are on is the deepest known one in Iceland. And looking out of the bay, you can see the tallest mountain in the country. The highest and lowest point both right here, in this land of extremes.
The glacier we are on has been melting since the 1930s. It is receding partly because of global warming, but mainly because the salt water of the sea is constantly washing in, and the salt causes it to melt. Granted, rising sea levels and the warmer climate of the planet in recent years have accelerated this effect so that it is now melting much faster. And for all that I’ve always known that the melting of ice caps, Greenland, glaciers, etcetera was a Bad Thing - it is not until coming here that I really get a feeling in my soul of exactly what this is that we are losing. Someday this will be just a lake. But for now, at least, it is still a wonder.
They are strewn about as far as your eyes can see, and even though I had seen pictures of this before, there is nothing that could have prepared me for how it looks when it is actually in front of you.
We get out of the car, and the air is so fresh and crisp and cold - it feels like the universe has left the refrigerator door open. Up close, the sight in front of you seems almost unreal - it must be manufactured, Vegas came to town and made these shapes out of Styrofoam to lure you into the casino or something - but it’s not.
I thought that being on a glacier would be like the planet Hoth from the start of Empire Strikes back, or the part of The Left Hand of Darkness where they decide to run over the ice. Pretty much all my expectations of Iceland are now that it can only be compared to other planets / fictional worlds. Trying to compare it to other things on Earth seems totally unfair. It’s in another league entirely.
At any rate, being on the melting glacier is not like either of these things. It is cold, but it doesn’t have a frozen sort of static beauty. It’s very mobile and alive - the wind is cutting, chunks of ice are crashing into the bay, birds are wheeling around overhead, and you can make out a few boats in the distance on the water.
After walking around a bit in complete awe, we go into to the small shop where you can purchase tickets for a boat tour and buy tickets for a boat tour. We had wanted the zodiac boat, which is like an inflatable raft with a motor on it, but the zodiac boat has broken, and its passengers are being evacuated while we wait. We opt for the not-broken amphibious boat tour instead.
Although the ice was amazing, just viewing it from shore, being out among the formations is another experience entirely. You can see such detail up close - especially the texture of the ice, and the way the sun makes some of the ice pieces seem luminous when they are right in front of you.
To me, it doesn’t look like something that is melting. It looks like a frozen kingdom, like some ancient Norse myth in which an entire city gets hit with a freezing ray by one of the gods. Some parts of it look like the pieces of an enormous frozen chess set. And because it is all melting, if you saw this another summer, or even a week later, it would not look the same. The formations are ever shifting and changing. Some of the pieces we can see melting right in front of us.
Because the glacier that is melting is so big, the lake that we are on is the deepest known one in Iceland. And looking out of the bay, you can see the tallest mountain in the country. The highest and lowest point both right here, in this land of extremes.
The glacier we are on has been melting since the 1930s. It is receding partly because of global warming, but mainly because the salt water of the sea is constantly washing in, and the salt causes it to melt. Granted, rising sea levels and the warmer climate of the planet in recent years have accelerated this effect so that it is now melting much faster. And for all that I’ve always known that the melting of ice caps, Greenland, glaciers, etcetera was a Bad Thing - it is not until coming here that I really get a feeling in my soul of exactly what this is that we are losing. Someday this will be just a lake. But for now, at least, it is still a wonder.