Jökulsárlón in the sunset

The bridge to the Ice.

At Jökulsárlón, southern Iceland, we spent hours and hours once at sunset and once in the daytime and took picutres. Well, seeing the unusual setting there, who would hold it against us?

Jökulsárlón is a unique place in Iceland. I did write about it already, but I didn't fully explain, I guess.

The Vatnajökull glacier flows down of the mountain bowl it lies in in several directions at once. Several of those end in lagoons of a special kind: The glacier tongues are so close to the ocean shore, that there was pretty much just the beach to seperate the ice from the salt water. The ice retreated, partially from climate change but mostly from the contact with saltwater which has a lower freezing point and melts ice faster. The glacier is now 7 kilometers back from the place of the bridge. About 70 years ago it was a little further down than the bridge now is.

The place the lagoon is now in is very deep and wide. The glacier tongue in the back calves these gigantic icebergs, that float in the lagoon until they break appart in pieces small enough that they swim down the little river that this photo was taken on. The river is shallow and therefore only little pieces float down.

The icebergs seen in other postings in my blog are the usual: 10 % above water, 90 % underneath. I thought, they would take a while to melt and break. I was pretty shocked, though, to hear that in average it takes 7 years for the icebergs to melt and swim out.

At the sea shore the ice fragments are thrown back onto the beach a lot so we did take awesome photos there, too. But that is for other posts as well as our amphibic vehicle trip over the lagoon and the awesome other lagoon we went to - without the stream of tourists.

click to enlarge to full size

This bridge photo is a HDR from 3 exposures, merged in Dynamic Photo HDR, my favorite HDR program. I know most people favor Photomatix, which I own, too, but I just love my Dyn. Ph. HDR.

This view is from the sea shore side up towards the glacier. It would have been even more perfect if the seal that we saw swim in and out of the lagoon would have popped his head just this moment. But such luck would be more than improbable with a setting like this and the bracketing setup.


By the way: There are several posts in this blog already about this place (Jökulsárlón). If you want to see more, search the tags or follow this link: Tag Jökulsárlón