Iceland Diamond Beach and Glacier Photo Dump

 

This was the farthest east point on our drive along the south coast of Iceland before we turned around and headed back to Reykjavik and on to our next adventure. (For reasons I can't figure, these pictures posted in reverse-chronological order)

Here’s the glacial lagoon on the other side of the road, the source of the ice on Diamond Beach. If you look closely you can see another zebra iceberg.

Had some fun chatting with these tourists from Spain.

Bits of glacier break off and are swept out to sea, but the prevailing winds and currents bring them back to land and deposit them on this stretch of black sand beach, called Diamond Beach because of the sparkles.

Kinda hard to see. This river flood plain looks like it can carry a gigantic amount of water, but only a small glacial fed stream runs through it now. However, at some time in the past magma came up under the glacier, melting it from below. The water seeped towards the edge until it broke free all at once and caused a “glacial flood.”

You can almost get where those myths come from about goblins who were caught out by the first rays of sunlight in the morning and turned to stone. And btw times of sunrise and sunset can be hard to predict: the length of day increases by 3 hours between the first and last day of April. That’s huge! So maybe we can forgive the goblins being caught unaware by sunrise.

Lumpy lava supporting a thick carpet of moss. Yet another photo of a landscape that doesn’t look like it’s on Planet Earth.

Puffin! If I can’t have the real one I’ll take a statue.

Representation of the magma spike underlying Iceland

The “Lava Museum” may have been the best small science museum we’ve ever seen. And you guys all know how much we love local museums, the stories towns tell about themselves.