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Iceberg Lake
Amy Morris
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Today was another amazing sight - the iceberg lagoon made by chunks of ice melting off of the Breidamerkurjokull glacier. It is called Jokulsarlon, though we went to a smaller, less tourist populated one called Breidalon first. The lagoon is famous for staring in James Bond, Die Another Day - where they bloked off the river that runs out into the sea, and froze over the lagoon. However they did lose 6 Aston Martin DB9s into the lagoon when trying to make the scenes!
The lagoon itself is awesome. Loads of huge icebergs floating around, different shapes, sizes, colours. Only 10% of the iceberg can be seen above the water. There are lines on some of them, where the bottom has melted and the iceberg has lifted further out of the water - the line is from where the previous position of the water. Further out of the lagoon the river runs into the sea and you can see the icebergs that have escaped being battered by the waves and eventually being washed up onto the black lava beach. Again quite cool. The ice melts slower than usual as the lagoon is made up of fresh and salt water - apparently that makes the ice quite good for drinks!
We took an amphibious vehicle ride around the lagoon to get closer to the icebergs and learn more about them.
We then headed back to the hotel where we stayed the night before as we were staying there again. On the way back we popped into a local geothermally heated swimming pool - again good views from it, and nice warm jacuzzis! We then got back to the hotel and wandered out the back along a short track that lead us the another glacier tongue.
We popped back to the national park to watch the video of the volcanic eruption of the sub-glacier volcano in the icecap - it was huge - 3000 billion cubic tonnes of water flowed off the icecap and ruined the roads and bridges in its path to the sea. The footage was quite amazing.
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Breidarlon The smaller iceberg lagoon - yes I'm stood in shorts and flip flops with icebergs behind me...I got some funny looks for my choice of attire in iceland! |
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Glacier edge on the lagoon |
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Winding glacier |
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Jokulsarlon lagoon I took 50 photos of the lagoon and icebergs...! I have tried not to include all of them here you'll be glad to see! |
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More white things |
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Icebergs.... |
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Icebergs.... You can see the lines from previous water marks quite clearly on this one |
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mini iceberg |
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mini iceberg2 Amy and a mini iceberg on the lava beach! |
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glacier tongue out the back of our hotel |
