Our paths have already crossed once. After a passage across the North Sea, Paul’s chartered boat arrived at Diamond Beach. His team of twelve men included a film crew, and I watch their documentary in my hotel room in Höfn. The expedition cannot properly be said to have disembarked, as they got straight from the boat into kayaks, and paddled upriver to Jökulsárlón. (They claim to be travelling in the wake of the first settlers, but I’m not sure this is true.) Their scarlet hulls nudge around the icebergs, which are floating in the opposite direction, from the glacier to the sea. This scenic paddle was just a warm-up for their next challenge: climbing onto Vatnajökull. They choose to start their traverse of the ice cap on Breiðamerkurjökull, one of Vatnajökull’s biggest outlet glaciers. But once they reach it, there are arguments. How, for example, will they land the microlight on the ice cap, which is covered in snow? Jerry, the pilot, is incredulous that they could even consider it: ‘It’s like World War III up there.’ In the end Paul’s determination wins out, and Jerry removes the microlight’s landing gear – and ropes on a pair of skis in their place. ‘The Wright Brothers had nothing on me,’ Jerry brags, strapping down one of the skis. ‘They were just amateurs.’
As he takes off, the mike catches his words, blown back on the wind: ‘God, I hope this works.’
Now that more people travel in these regions, getting onto the glacier shouldn’t be so hard. The Visit Vatnajökull leaflet lists tour companies: Glacier Walks; Glacier Jeeps – ice and adventure; Glacier Journey – snowmobile and super jeeps; Glacier World – ‘where the nature nourishes your mind’; Glacier Trips; Glacier Adventure. But the weather is against me. By Saturday, heavy rains have damaged the roads. One of the bridges George drove across has washed away, and the water level has increased by 2 metres in the rivers of the south fjords. It looks as though the only part of the glacier I may ever encounter is the 6 tonnes of ice lifted from Jökulsárlón and preserved with cooling aggregate that the artist Olafur Eliasson exhibited in Berlin as Your Waste of Time.
Two intrepid guides from Glacier Adventure, Haukur Einarsson and Sindri Bessason, come to my rescue. We drive back in the direction of Jökulsárlón until their ATV turns off the road and bumbles through potholes and across streams towards Breiðamerkurjökull, pinning me to the back seat like an astronaut in an accelerating centrifuge. Breiðamerkur means broad forest. ‘There’s no forest here,’ Haukur points out, unnecessarily, ‘but in the Viking period, there was a great birch wood. Back then the climate was warmer and the glacier was smaller than today. This was the best farmland in the south-east!’ The descriptive names glaciers were given are now clues to the climate of the past. I wipe the condensation from the window. The sparse patches of vegetation are growing smaller, with more barren ground in between. Soon there’s not a single plant.
‘We just missed the crowberry season,’ Sindri says, braking in front of a moraine.
I open the door and jump out. Right into a puddle.
Since we do not have skis, snow-cats adapted to carry tonnes of equipment, microlights or kayaks – just ice pick and crampons – our ascent of the glacier will be much easier than Paul’s. After days of travelling, it feels good to abandon my rucksack in the car, and step out more lightly. Good, also, to walk without consulting a map, as no map would have kept me safe from precipitous crevasses anyway; I leave the choice of direction to Sindri and Haukur, who know the undulations and ogives of the ice by heart.
I step off the moraine and enter a world in which the ground is translucent, where depth is measured by light. I need to learn to walk again. Sindri shows me how to stamp down firmly onto the ice in my crampons, bounce a little even. With these metal claws strapped to the soles of my boots, I place my feet more slowly, trying not to stand on hollow ice which might collapse, or twist my ankle on a hummock. I keep my eyes down as I walk. I learn the glacier’s character through the contact of crampon teeth on its surface. Ice is less receptive than the earth. The shock each step delivers makes me aware how vulnerable my joints are, how fragile my body.
Those who walked here before me have left no footprints, only constellations of blistered stars where their crampons pricked the ice. I remember something I once read about Antarctic explorers’ footsteps: the snow that they stepped on, compressed by the weight of the body, would remain fixed in place as the lighter, unmarked snow around them blew away. These pillars of ice were visible from far away long after the explorer had passed on.
As snow falls on Vatnajökull it accumulates and grows denser, turning to firn even without the aid of human footfall. The glacier is a thousand metres deep at its centre. There is ancient ice here that formed while the Prose Edda was being written and has endured through all subsequent tellings and retellings of its tales. No wonder the story of ice, and how people survive it, has obsessed the country’s writers.
Here at the edge of the glacier I know there is between 200 and 300 metres of ice below me. Although I have researched the statistics, when I look down into the ice I cannot judge its depth. Even a few millimetres are hard to measure by sight, but tiny specks of ash or air bubbles guide the eye down. We stop whenever we see something extraordinary, which is often, given this is a barren desert without plants or animals or flies. (What are we doing here, foolish trespassers in our colourful jackets and jangling harnesses?) We see cliffs of ice imposing as Mount Rushmore, which seem, like that monument, to have human profiles; we see a black mound of ash like a troll’s hat, which prevents the ice beneath it from melting; we see fallen chunks of ice, crumbly as detergent tablets and similarly flecked with blue; and peering deep in a crevasse, I see a dented bruise of ice that gets deeper and bluer the further into it I look. Blue ice has no bubbles, making it the hardest of ices (it is chosen for runways in Antarctica). But it is no more blue than the blue sky is blue. The colour is just the result of how the rods and cones in my eyes perceive the passage of light over and into the ice.
It is September, the month when the year’s melting culminates. Water is everywhere. It trickles across the enamel curve of the horizon and circles into cavities. The water will seep beneath the ice cap, feeding into Jökulsárlón and other watercourses. Among all this water, I feel thirsty. I place my ice axe down across a gully, and using its handle to support me, I lower myself until I can dip my face into the freezing stream. I open my mouth and let the glacier run into me.
Paul had intended to cross the ice cap, a journey of over 50 miles. He had wanted to prove all kinds of things. He lists his expedition goals in a hollow voiceover. However, it is ‘the worst summer ever’ in Iceland. This ice cap is so vast it creates its own weather system, and the one it shows them is not pleasant. After five days on the ice, Paul explains, ‘we were proving nothing and getting very cold in the process’.
The film crew captures an altercation between two men, whose faces are completely hidden by protective clothing, about the logistics of brewing tea. They shout to each other over the wind, but their words can barely be heard. ‘Ice formed like armour plating on our clothes,’ Paul recalls, ‘yet the snow remained too soft for tent pegs.’ They use their increasingly versatile skis to support the tents instead. When the tents collapse under several feet of snow, it is the last straw; they have a schedule to keep to and rivers to kayak. They make their retreat in a brief lull, with force 12 gales predicted.
The cameraman must have tired of filming white-outs. Cue a bridging shot, with an animated red dotted line heading into the centre of Vatnajökull – and then turning back.
The best explorers know when to give up. The Swedish geologist Hakon Wadell, an honourable precursor of Iceland Breakthrough on the ice cap, showed the risk of not doing so. Wadell made an expedition to map the central snowfield in the autumn of 1919. At the time, Vatnajökull covered an area of about 9,000 square kilometres – much of which was scattered to a depth of 10 centimetres with black, sulphurous ash from a volcanic eruption the previous year. Wadell was studying the causes of volcanic phenomena in the
surrounding snowfields, those that had led, for example, to the violent and terrible eruptions of Öræfajökull. Where a glacier fills a volcano’s calderas, the ice will melt suddenly as it erupts, causing catastrophic floods. Such floods are so common here that the Icelandic word for them, jökulhlaup, has been adopted as the official international term. Wadell particularly wanted to study volcanic eruptions around the neighbouring outlets of Siðujökull, Skaftárjökull and Skeiðarárjökull, as he had noted some confusion among ‘authors of recent times’ who used the names interchangeably.
Leaving base camp at the end of August, Wadell spent a couple of weeks on the ice cap taking measurements with a dioptre and a barometer, and he found the huge crater basin he had been looking for. Following his investigations, Wadell made his descent from the glacier through ‘moving and gently fissured’ snow. Then inexplicably, on 18 September, he decided to go back. He writes: ‘the expedition was overtaken by a snowstorm and had to spend two days and nights on the ice under disconcerting circumstances. Two of the four horses were lost and the greater part of the equipment and also a collection of materials which was very important for scientific investigation.’ He did, however, return safely to publish a beautiful map of the now-vanished glacier outlets. They show that the terminus of Breiðamerkurjökull once reached within 250 metres of the sea, and ice covered the barren area over which Haukur drove the ATV.
When glacial ice melts faster than it is replaced, the outlet glaciers begin to lose mass and retreat inland. In the 1980s Vatnajökull still covered 12 per cent of Iceland, but that figure has now shrunk to 9 per cent. No one needs data sensors to observe the change on Breiðamerkurjökull.
‘Last year, our crampon station was over there,’ Sindri laments, pointing to a ridge now much too far from the terminus of the glacier to walk in crampons.
Paul’s team were standing where we are now when they began their retreat. This is not to say we are anywhere near as intrepid. We turn and begin to make our descent and, in place of the dazzling ice cap, we see what the melting glacier leaves behind. The tip of its grizzled tongue lolls in the dull mud. It stretches thinly across the valley it carved out in its stronger days, from Fellsfjall – its summit seething with mist – to the lagoon. A dribble of water on the moraine reflects the sky, grey as mercury in a mirror.
Sindri’s neighbour, a farmer in his eighties, has witnessed Breiðamerkurjökull’s retreat. His sheep once grazed the mountains that tower above us, and he crossed from one peak to another using the glacier that lay between them as a bridge. Now the ice is gone; there is only a deep gorge in its place. The ridges on the mountains all slope upwards towards the coast, showing how deeply the weight of ice inland depresses the crust of the Earth into the mantle.
‘Sea-level rise doesn’t worry me so much,’ says Haukur when we talk of the consequences of climate change. ‘I’m more concerned what happens with the tectonic plates. They are going to rise up when the ice melts.’
The rain rattles on my helmet. I shiver as I take my last steps from the ice to the moraine. I’m cold, and I’ve only been on Breiðamerkurjökull five hours, not five days.
The priest in Laxness’s novel Under the Glacier has an excuse for not preaching: the glacier is silent, he says. The lilies of the field are silent.
The bishop’s emissary wants to hear more about the lilies of the field. He needs some reassuring doctrine to counter the strange cult he has encountered. ‘Are you sure the flowers are silent? if a sensitive enough microphone were placed beside them?’ he asks. (He is a believer in modern technology.)
‘Words are misleading. I am always trying to forget words,’ Pastor Jón responds. ‘If one looks at the glacier for long enough words cease to have any meaning on God’s earth.’
Not everyone would agree that the glacier is silent, but it is certainly speaking a different kind of language. When the mass of an ice cap increases, its weight forces ice out across the landscape. As these outlet glaciers creep forward, any rocks frozen into them will gouge the bedrock below, leaving tracks or ‘chatter marks’. As the ice retreats, the rocks themselves are left behind. The larger boulders, known as ‘erratics’ (from the Latin verb for ‘to stray’) may well be unlike the rocks native to the place where they have fallen: they are very noticeable. The glacier’s chatter and its rocky remains have provided clues to the history of the Earth.
The radical nineteenth-century geologist Louis Agassiz was the first to popularize the idea of a relatively recent Ice Age. Through his observation of mountains in Scotland, he found evidence of glacial action and claimed that ‘great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland’, once covered parts of Europe. This theory was opposed by many natural scientists, who preferred to believe glacial landscapes were caused by a biblical flood. Geological research began to shape debates about the world’s origins and challenge conventional Christian beliefs. Eventually, Agassiz’s interpretations found acceptance. They now underlie our understanding of climate science. In the words of Pastor Jón: ‘The church is closed but the glacier is open.’
Nature became the newest religion, as well as the oldest. During his Travels in Alaska in 1879 the Scottish naturalist John Muir perceived the mountains through the lens of his lapsed Calvinism as ‘Nature’s Bible’ in which ‘icy cañons opened to view and closed again in regular succession, like the pages of a book.’ Muir depicts himself as a pseudo-pastor, ready to interpret the wonders of nature by ‘preaching glacial gospel in a rambling way’ to his fellow travellers on the steamship. Muir’s doctrine was silver-tongued scientific interpretation, while Pastor Jón was silent with awe.
On the drive back, Sindri and Haukur try to remember all the films that have used Vatnajökull as a location. Sindri lists them laconically: ‘Batman Begins, Interstellar, those adverts for mints.’
‘Over there, in Kálfafellsdalur, Walter Mitty was in Nepal!’ Haukur jumps in. ‘He also hung out in Höfn. And Mitty was actually using Iceland as Iceland sometimes, not another planet or the end of this one.’ This glacier has also seen two Bonds: A View to a Kill (Roger Moore’s stuntman leaping on skis down crevasses as Russians fire explosively after him) and Die Another Day (Pierce Brosnan’s absurd car chase across a frozen Jökulsárlón). Lara Croft was here too, in Tomb Raider, following the same route as Paul over the glacial lake and onto the ice cap, despite being warned of danger by a mystic child.
It’s easy to see why the glacier has been used to depict other places and other times. The speed of its retreat creates a vertiginous sense of time’s advance. It’s not only Hollywood that has taken advantage of Iceland’s characteristic otherworldliness. The rocky terrain north of Vatnajökull was used for moon landing practice by Apollo missions during the 1960s, and astronauts refined techniques for lunar exploration and geological sampling. As the Earth changes, this rocky landscape may hint at humanity’s future, as well as its past.
III
Haukur drops me off in a farmyard, saying he’ll pick me up in a few hours. Meanwhile, he suggests I visit a museum dedicated to a local writer. It is housed in a former sheep barn. Along one side of the building the corrugated iron is clad with giant book spines, representing the complete works of Þórbergur Þórðarson.
It’s an impressive output. I wonder what influence growing up in such harsh conditions in the glacier’s shadow would have on a writer. The title of one of Þórbergur’s only books available in English translation, The Stones Speak, reveals his sensitivity to the mountains. In such a desolate place, with so little entertainment, a rich imagination was necessary: ‘Here and there on the sills, ledges and crags there were certain outcrops that resembled cones, knobs and pegs . . . the rocks were teeming with silent, unobtrusive life. – They were no longer rocks. They were a giant art gallery.’
Visitors to this museum must use their imagination too. ‘We don’t have many artefacts from Þórbergur’s early life,’ explains the audio guide, ‘so we are celebrating his intellectual heritage.’ I
peel off as many of my wet clothes as seems decent and hang them above a portable heater near the door. I shiver as I enter the gallery, where water trickles over a diorama of synthetic rocks. I can feel wet gravel through my socks. It turns out that a little further in, there’s another water display, this time inadvertent: rain is dripping through a gap in the rusty roof. This museum visit is an immersive experience.
Before the arrival of the wireless, families huddled in the badstofa would keep boredom at bay on winter evenings by reading, repairing tools or working on embroidery. Þórbergur often played a game of jacks using the bones of small animals. Such entertainments were known as the kvöldvaka or evening wake (as in ‘staying awake’). Þórbergur’s mother had a talent for reading aloud, and the volumes she read from survive. There are devotional and patriotic books: a Bible; a hymnal; and an edition of rímur (a strict form of traditional verse) belonging to Þórbergur’s uncle, with notes scribbled in the margins. These books were as hard-worked as their owners. A copy of Njal’s Saga is falling to pieces. The signatures are coming away from the spine, and the pages are crumpled and chipped at the edges. It’s inscribed on the flyleaf with the names of the four farmers, including Þórbergur’s father, who saved up to purchase it together and shared it between them.
The books from the twentieth century are less worn: they are Þórbergur’s own. He left home aged eighteen, and worked as a fisherman and itinerant labourer, before settling as a teacher in Reykjavik. When he published his first book, Letters to Lara, it was hailed by literary critics as a masterpiece, but its experimental style and socialist views cost him his teaching job. He was radical, too, as a nature writer – an ecologist who ascribed animate thought to nature:
The Library of Ice Page 18