Iceland review - 2019, Page 31

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Iceland Review
ent. This hut has no toilet or running water, so melted
snow serves as drinking water. Another newer and
smaller hut contains an essential outhouse, although
for the uninitiated, it feels like a place best avoided.
The icy cold glacier air howls around your exposed
bottom, amplifying a description-defying stench that
renders breathing through the nose highly undesir-
able. However, that same hut also contains what is
perhaps the humble complex’s greatest attraction:
a steam bath! Even if the Grímsfjall huts are at an
altitude of 1,700m (5,580ft) in the middle of a glacier,
they’re built over an active volcano. Drilling a few
dozen metres into the rock releases scalding-hot
steam, used to heat the huts and power the steam
bath and showers. There’s nothing like the feeling of
sitting with new friends in a piping hot steam bath
after a long day on the glacier, listening to stories of
catastrophic storms on former trips, before stepping
half-naked into the freezing stillness of the midnight
sun in the middle of Vatnajökull, letting the cold dry
your skin while looking speechless out over the ice
sheet which stretches as far as the eye can see. You
feel so small in the grand scheme of things, and yet so
grateful for experiencing such a magical moment.
But as Magnús said, this is no holiday: we’re here
to work! The tasks are many and varied, some requir-
ing a great deal of manpower. The group is split up
into teams, and the first morning, work starts early.
The visibility is increasing and I can catch a glimpse
of Grímsfjall mountain through the clouds as I join a
large group travelling towards the Grímsvötn lakes
on jeeps and snowmobiles. Our mission is to drill a
core from the glacier with an ice drill to figure out
how much this winter’s precipitation has added to
the glacier. The ice cores tell the glacier’s story: how
much snow fell each year, how much of it melted, and
how the ash from the last few volcanic eruptions has
spread over the area. The team drills in different loca-
tions on the glacier over the next few days.
Another small group drags ground-penetrating
radar equipment over the glacier to measure the
glacier’s layers and the water levels under the frozen
Grímsvötn lakes, while others attend to seismo-
graphs and GPS gauges at the glacier’s edge. The
You feel so small in the grand
scheme of things, and yet so
grateful for experiencing such a
magical moment.