Veronica Baker: Langjökull

Well, today we went on the adventure of a lifetime. Well, at least it likely is if you live outside of Iceland and the Arctic regions...

We took a tour with the adventure providers Ice Travel, who were absolutely fantastic! Our guide, Arngrimur Hermannsson (Addi) was a jolly fellow who told us more stories than I can remember! Beginning with how the University of Iceland is partnering with some other folks to build the world's largest ice hotel, underneath this glacier! The glacier is up to 580m thick in different places, so that shouldn't be too difficult. At its highest peak, Langjökull ("Long Glacier") is 1450m - we went up to about 1350m today.

He told us another story as well. Measuring glaciers is very difficult, because the melting water at different levels interferes with radars. The University of Iceland has created a super long antenna (think hundreds of metres long) the lies on the ice, and send long waves of ... radar magic ... down, which can accurately measure the thickness. One time when they were measuring, they accidentally found a plane! It had crashed a long time ago, and been covered in ice. Years later, they heard of scientists in the US trying to find planes that had had to make emergency landings in Greenland during the second World War. Eventually, they used this radar thing and found the planes without any problems. Years later, they finally finished removing the plane from the ice through a tunnel they had melted. You can read a bit more about it here.

Our first stop of the day was at Barnafoss ("The Waterfall of the Children"), which leads to Hraunfossar ("Lava Waterfalls"). Barnafoss is in a lava field, which makes for great scenery around it. The legends say that two boys grew restless and tried to follow their parents to church one day, crossing a natural stone bridge across the waterfall. They became dizzy while crossing the bridge, fell in and drowned. Their mother later put a spell on the bridge.

Hraunfossar

Barnafoss

Lava near Barnafoss

Barnafoss

Insanely clear pond

After this stop, we boarded the bus again to take us to Langjökull - Iceland's second largest glacier. At the base of the glacier was a bridge that we couldn't fit on. The guardrails of the bridge were removed to allow us across! It was a pretty tight squeeze. The eight tires had to be deflated before we went to far onto the glacier. We had absolutely beautiful weather - it wasn't even very cold, surprising since all we could see forever was ice!