Iceland - climate change and glacier guides

A very useful and thought provides provoking piece from Al Jazeera news explores some new issues for Iceland, with respect to its tourist industry.
It describes some of the locations where climate change appears to be having an impact on the activity of the local tourist industry.
I've visited Solheimajokull several times. It's an accessible glacier to the east of Reykjavik and close to the ring road.

Each time the weather has been different. The picture above was taken in 2015.
The glacier guides have to change the access point to the glacier regularly and also work out a route for the tour. Last time I went, there was an ice cave that could be accessed, but that could very well be gone by now.
There are also fences going up at Skogafoss, to protect the grass there and try to encourage people to take a particular route up to the falls, and then the staircase up the side to the viewing platform at the top.
One good site to follow for this sort of news is Iceland Monitor on Facebook. This provides a guide to the latest news which connects with changes to the environment, or similar.
This is a country that is still getting used to the sheer volume of tourism it now receives.

Simon Ross at Solheimajokull

Part of Discover the World's educational materials and added just over a month ago...
Very useful video.


Sign up to Discover Geography, and you can also download the Mission:Explore Iceland pack that I helped create with John Sayers, Helen Steer and Tom Morgan Jones.

Iceland Trip - Post 5 of 10 - Day 2

Day 2 dawned early, and the weather (as it was for most of the day) was amazingly mild. We checked out of the hotel as we were staying somewhere else that night, and headed out of the city of Reykjavik and into the surrounding countryside. The light started to brighten as we moved out to the east, and the weather improved as well, which was a bonus. We made our first stop at the Hellisheidi Geothermal Plant, which takes heat from a volcano and provides hot water for the housing in Reykjavik. We saw a short film and had a tour of the plant, and then headed back to the coach and had an hour's drive up over high fell and with a view towards the coast. We encountered the rocky former coastline, and then pulled up at the Eyjafjallajokull visitor centre that has been built over the road from Thorvaldseyri. On a previous visit, I pulled up to the farm itself and spoke to the farmer and his wife in their home but now it was a film and a good pause for the students to see how the volcano affected people living in the area.
We then moved on a few miles to the curtain waterfall of Skogafoss, where we broke for lunch.

 

The weather was certainly changeable, and we had sunshine as we climbed up to the top viewing platform, and into the spray of the waterfall. Everyone enjoyed the falls, and the surrounding countryside and we were then on for another trip along the coastline before heading inland towards the glacier of Solheimajokull. We were fitted with crampons, and then walked up to the glacier - a longer walk than it used to be as the glacier has receded quite a way over the last few years. Everyone had the chance to walk on the glacier, and as we came to the end of the tour, the light was spectacular.

 

From the glacier we then had a short drive to Vik, where we were staying. I had a shot time to appreciate the wonderful view from my hotel room before it got dark.

Iceland Epilogue 3

As you may know, I went to Iceland at the start of the month (I haven't mentioned it much since...)

Thanks to Andy Palmer, textbook author and examiner, and someone that I bumped into 3 times in Iceland, and then on a Digitalworlds GIS course the week after, for this link....
Extreme Ice Survey is a useful resource for those studying GLACIATION.

I walked on the Solheimajokull glacier a couple of weeks ago.
Here's a pic of me to prove it. Note the 7 layers of clothing I'm wearing (plus my ancient mountain Gore Tex brought out of retirement), and the outwash plain that you can see in the background. The haze is a dust storm of volcanic ash, and the black ash can still be seen clicking to the ice on the left of the picture.
The suggestion is that the ash made the ice darker, therefore absorbing more heat, and that this may have speeded up the localised melting of this ice, particularly where it was already thinned. The snout was certainly rather thin...

The Extreme Ice Survey website also includes a very handy TIMELAPSE.

This was produced using the webcam here, pointing down on the very glacier that I stood on.
Watch the timelapse by clicking the link above...

It shows the glacier over a period from April 2007 to October 2010, and the ice can be seen melting away and retreating.