Jökull - 01.01.2019, Page 18

Terminus lakes on the south side of Vatnajökull
Figure 13. The development of terminus lakes by Kvíárjökull. For explanations and credits see Figures 3 and
12. – Þróun sporðlóna við Kvíárjökul (sjá nánari skýringar við 3. og 12. mynd).
trough so that a lake that may potentially be formed
by further retreat of the glacier is only ∼0.5 km2 in
area (Magnússon and others, 2012).
Fjallsjökull
A shallow lake, now known as Sprekalón, was first
formed at Fitjar in front of Fjallsjökull in 1936 ac-
cording to F. Björnsson (1993) (Figures 14 and 16).
A photograph taken by him in 1938 shows five or six
small lakes by the terminus, but most of them did
not last long. One of them, at first called Deildarár-
lón, which was to become Fjallsárlón, grew during the
subsequent years and was ∼0.5 km2 in 1945 accord-
ing to the AMS (1951) maps of the area. This lake was
at least 45 m deep in 1951 (Eyþórsson, 1951). The
lake depth was measured at 58 m in 1966 (Howarth
and Price, 1969), and the lake bottom then reached
46 m below sea level. Other short-lived lakes were
formed north of the main lake after Hrútárjökull and
Fjallsjökull separated in the mid-1940s, and one of
them merged with the main lake in the 1970s. In 1964,
the combined area of lakes in front of Fjallsjökull was
∼0.9 km2 (NLSI, aerial images 1964).
Fjallsárlón grew a little in the following decades,
maintaining a more or less steady size from 1980
to 1994, when the area had become somewhat more
JÖKULL No. 69, 2019 17