Ice ice baby

I was having dinner with my traveling companions, Elsa and another little guy. We were discussing what we were going to do next day. There were three options: seabird watching on Ingolfshofdi, glacier walking on Skaftafell National Park, or snowmobiling on the Vatnajokull ice cap. The only option to which we all agreed was bird watching, but in order to do that we had to catch a ride from a tractor-pulled haywagon because Ingolfshofdi is a promontory rising in the middle of a shallow, tidal lagoon through which there is no car access. And we had to be in the correct spot at midday or else we would miss our ride. The people in Iceland, as it turns out, do respect schedules. We arrived two minutes after the hour, only to see the tractor moving away, taking other tourists to see and photograph the puffins, skuas, arctic terns, and other seabirds. We had no other option but to go to plan B: a walking tour in the ice of one of the glaciers in Skaftafell.

Skaftafell National Park is the biggest national park in Europe. It encompasses Vatnajokull Ice Cap, which is the third largest mass of ice in the surface of the Earth (right after Antarctica and Greenland). From this huge mass, several rivers of ice have made their move, forming the glaciers we can see from the road that leads to the park. It was in one of these tongues of ice that we would be spending the next three hours, taking a little stroll.

Ice: now there's a subject everyone's been talking about for the last months. Ever since Al Gore started his campaign against global warming, the melting of the ice in the polar regions of the Earth, and the receding of glaciers have been subjects for conversations all over the world. I have watched the movie "An Inconvenient Truth", and I have often wondered about the climate changes I've been feeling in my own country and whether it's all related. One thing seemed certain: if this all has to do with the earth getting warmer and ice melting, there probably would not be a better place to learn about it than Iceland.

Having learned our lesson from a couple of hours before, this time we arrived at the location on time (a few minutes earlier, actually). As our guide, Bob, was fitting the crampons to our boots, I thought I detected an australian accent. As it turned out, he was from New Zealand, and not too happy about having his accent mistaken for australian. He had worked for a long time as a guide in Fox Glacier in his home country and that was to be his first day on this season in Iceland (he'd been there already in the previous year). Apart from me and the other little guy (Elsa didn't want to go), our group was two austrian girls, their welsh friend, and an italian couple. Bob gave us a ride to the base of Svinafellsjokull glacier on his red land rover, and from there we walked a few minutes through rock until we finally got to the ice.

At first, walking with crampons seemed a bit awkward. Instead of walking normally, I had to stomp my feet, so I could get a good grip on the ice. After a while I got used to it, and was able to stop thinking about how to walk and start enjoying the experience. And what an experience! All I could see was ice. In front of me, behind, to the sides. In some places it was a dirty gray, in other places it was a beautiful sparkling white. We knew that there were dangerous crevasses nearby and occasionally Bob would tell us that in a certain spot we should not get too close to the left or the right side because it was a huge drop. Trying not to think about it too much, I just followed his instructions and enjoyed the landscape.

During the walk, Bob was giving us the normal talk about Glaciers, how they are formed, and the history about this particular one. Like many in the world (but not all), Svinafellsjokull is receding. Some centuries ago it joined with his neighbor Skaftafellsjokull ("Jokull" being the icelandic word for glacier) near what is now the road to the park. At that time, when farmers wanted to take their sheep to the pastures in the mountains that border the glacier, they had to carry the sheep one by one through the glacier in the beginning of summer and do the same thing to fetch them before winter came. Eventually he came to the bit about global warming. It seems that the next sign of global warming will be that Iceland will actually get colder. Now this was something I wasn't expecting to hear, but after the explanation, it made sense. What stops Iceland from getting colder right now is the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean. If the Earth is warming and the ice in the polar regions melts into the ocean, it will disrupt the Gulf Stream, thus causing the temperature in the island to drop.

After a few hours walking we had to come back. Conversation with Bob changed from the subject of climate change issues, to lighter subjects like the rugby world cup and how big would the score be in the game between the portuguese and the all-blacks. We took off our crampons, got back in the red land rover, and headed back to the National Park. After we left, I kept daydreaming about trekking in other glaciers like the Baltoro Glacier in the Himalayas or Perito Moreno in Patagonia. I don't know if I will ever be able to do something like that in my lifetime, but I could not help but think about what we are doing to the planet, and that maybe in the future there will be no more glaciers for our grandchildren to walk on.