Vatnajökull National Park

Stand still for a moment and listen. The wind comes down off the ice with a cold, clean edge, and it carries almost nothing with it. No traffic. No birdsong for long stretches. Underfoot, the ground is black grit and rounded stones, washed here by meltwater. Ahead, a white mass fills the horizon, and its edges break into blue tongues of ice pouring down between dark mountains. You are on the southern edge of Vatnajökull National Park.

The name comes from the glacier at its heart. Vatnajökull is the largest ice cap in Iceland, and one of the largest in Europe. It covers roughly eight percent of the whole country. In Icelandic, the name means something like water glacier, and that is a fitting name. Much of what shapes this landscape is water — frozen, melting, flooding, and running out to the sea.

The national park was created in 2008. It joined two older protected areas, Skaftafell in the south and Jökulsárgljúfur in the north, and wrapped them around the ice cap itself. The result is one of the largest protected areas in Europe. It covers more than a tenth of Iceland. In 2019, UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List, under a title that sums it up neatly: the dynamic nature of fire and ice.

That phrase is not decoration. Here is the first surprise for many visitors. Under this ice there are active volcanoes. Grímsvötn, Bárðarbunga and Öræfajökull all sit beneath or within the glacier. When one of them erupts, the heat melts the ice from below. Meltwater collects under the glacier and then, sometimes very suddenly, it bursts out. Icelanders call this a jökulhlaup, a glacial outburst flood. The word is so specific that geologists around the world now use it in English.

Look south toward the coast and you will see the evidence. The wide, flat plains of black sand and gravel are called sandur. They are built from material that floods and meltwater carried out from under the ice. In 1996, an eruption beneath the glacier sent a large flood across the plain of Skeiðarársandur. It damaged the Ring Road and swept away part of a long bridge. Twisted girders from that bridge are still kept by the roadside, as a reminder.

From the south, the mountains around Öræfajökull rise straight out of these plains. This ice-covered volcano holds Hvannadalshnúkur, the highest peak in Iceland, at a little over two thousand metres. The name Öræfi roughly means wasteland, or land without harbours. Historical accounts link the name to a violent eruption in the fourteenth century that devastated the farms in the district. Today, the farms are back, small and scattered along the base of the slopes.

The area of Skaftafell sits on a green, sheltered ridge between two glacier tongues. After the black sand, the change is sudden. Here there are birch trees, mosses and wildflowers in summer. A walking trail climbs to Svartifoss, the black waterfall. The water drops over a cliff of dark basalt columns. These columns formed as lava cooled slowly and cracked into regular shapes, often six-sided, like a giant set of organ pipes.

From the visitor area, short trails also lead toward the glacier tongue of Skaftafellsjökull. As you walk, watch the ground. You will pass ridges of rock and gravel called moraines. The glacier pushed them up and then left them behind as it melted back. Some of these ridges mark where the ice stood only a few decades ago. That is the second surprise. You can measure the retreat with your own feet.

The glaciers here are shrinking, and scientists have tracked this closely for many years. Each tongue of ice now ends further up its valley than it once did. Where the ice has pulled back, it leaves lakes, bare rock and grey silt. Plants arrive slowly. First come mosses and lichens, then grasses, then small shrubs. Walking from the ice edge outward is a little like walking forward through time, from bare ground to living soil.

Further east along the Ring Road lies Jökulsárlón, the glacier lagoon, now part of the park. Here the glacier Breiðamerkurjökull ends in deep water. Blocks of ice break from its front and float across the lagoon. Some are bright white. Others are a deep, clear blue, because the ice is so dense it absorbs other colours of light. Some carry dark stripes of volcanic ash, laid down in eruptions long ago.

The icebergs drift slowly toward a short channel and out to sea. On the black beach nearby, the waves throw smaller pieces back onto the sand. They sit there glittering, which is why people call the place Diamond Beach. Seals often swim in the lagoon and the channel, looking for fish. If you stand quietly, you may hear the ice itself — creaking, cracking, and now and then, the deep splash of a block rolling over.

A few practical thoughts. The glacier looks solid and inviting, but it is not safe to walk on without a qualified guide. Crevasses can hide under snow, and the ice front can collapse without warning. Guided glacier walks and, in the colder months, ice cave tours run from the southern side. Weather changes fast here. Wind, rain and sun can all arrive within an hour, so dress in layers.

Before you leave, look once more at the ice. It holds snow that fell centuries ago, pressed slowly into glacier. Beneath it, volcanoes are still at work. Around you, the sand, the moraines and the young birch trees all record what the ice and the fire have done. Listen to the wind again. Notice the colour of the meltwater in the rivers, milky grey with fine rock. That water is the glacier, still moving out to sea.