Vatnajökull
Interesting facts
- In 1362 Öræfajökull, on the ice cap's southern rim, blasted out about 10 cubic kilometres of tephra, an eruption on the scale of Pinatubo in 1991.
- That eruption wiped out the prosperous district of Litlahérað and some forty farms; the area was later called Öræfi, a name that came to mean wasteland.
- Bárðarbunga, hidden beneath the ice, is Iceland's second-highest mountain at about 2,000 metres, with a buried caldera some 700 metres deep.
- About 8,600 years ago Bárðarbunga fed the Þjórsárhraun, thought to be the largest lava flow on Earth since the last Ice Age, with a volume of over 20 cubic kilometres.
- Its 2014–2015 fissure eruption at Holuhraun, north of the ice cap, poured out more than 1.2 cubic kilometres of lava in six months.
- The ice cap covers roughly 8 per cent of Iceland, and by volume it is second in Europe only to the ice cap of Severny Island in Novaya Zemlya.
- In 1950 the airliner Geysir crash-landed on Bárðarbunga; all six crew survived and were rescued after six days on the ice.
- The difficulty of that rescue led Iceland to set up its first specialised air rescue units.
- Eighteenth-century sources record the ice cap under an older name, Klofajökull.
Why it is worth it
Vatnajökull is the great ice cap of south-east Iceland and the largest glacier in Europe outside the Arctic, covering more than 7,000 square kilometres. The ice averages around 380 metres thick and reaches about 950 metres at its deepest, holding some 3,000 cubic kilometres of water. From its dome some thirty outlet glaciers pour down between the mountains towards the lowlands, among them Breiðamerkurjökull, Skaftafellsjökull and Fláajökull.
Beneath the ice are active volcanoes, and the collision of fire and ice is what makes Vatnajökull extraordinary. Grímsvötn, a caldera buried under the glacier, erupted in 1996 and again in 2011, when its ash plume rose to about 17 km. Heat from below melts the ice into subglacial lakes that can burst out as floods called jökulhlaups; one in 1934 released about 15 cubic kilometres of water. On the southern rim stands Öræfajökull, whose summit Hvannadalshnúkur, at about 2,110 metres, is the highest point in Iceland.
At the ice cap's southern edge, Breiðamerkurjökull ends in Jökulsárlón, a lagoon where icebergs calve and drift slowly towards the sea. The glacier and its surroundings form the core of Vatnajökull National Park, founded on 7 June 2008 and inscribed in 2019 on the UNESCO World Heritage list as a landscape of "fire and ice". Its otherworldly surfaces have stood in for distant places in films from A View to a Kill to Interstellar.
Getting there
The ice cap is best approached from the south coast along Route 1. The town of Höfn, with Hornafjörður Airport (HFN) about 77 km from the ice cap's centre, is the main base in the south-east. The nearest large town is Akureyri, about 155 km to the north. Walking on the glacier should only be done with a qualified guide.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Vatnajökull is the largest and most voluminous ice cap in Iceland, and the second largest in area in Europe after the Severny Island ice cap of Novaya Zemlya. It is in the south-east of the island, covering approximately 8% of the country.
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