Measurements of Sólheimajökull have been kept since 1931, and in that time the snout has withdrawn more than a kilometre back up its own valley. The tongue is an outlet of Mýrdalsjökull, Iceland's fourth-largest ice cap, and it flows south from beneath the Katla caldera toward the black gravel of Sólheimasandur.
Guides running Sólheimajökull Glacier Hike & Ice Climbing tours cross ice that fell as snow centuries before crampons existed. The name is borrowed from the farm below it: Sólheimar, the home of the sun.
The retreat has redrawn the map. A proglacial lagoon opened at the terminus around 2010 and widens each summer, so the walking route shifts season by season and no two years share the same approach. The ice itself is striped grey and black with tephra — ash from Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, from Katla in 1918, from older eruptions buried deeper still. Meltwater drains into Jökulsá á Sólheimasandi, a river that runs sulphurous with volcanic gas. Glaciologists return to the same stakes every year, and the numbers they carry away are among the most cited in Icelandic climate work.
Up close the surface is not smooth. Moulins bore vertical shafts through the ice, some dropping further than a rope will reach. Crevasse fields open in curved ranks where the glacier bends around bedrock. Seracs lean, sun cups pit the summer surface, and cryoconite dust melts small dark wells into the white. The near-vertical faces used for ísklifur — the Icelandic word for ice climbing — are cut fresh by guides through the season, because a wall that held an ice axe in June may have collapsed by August. A guided ice hike here is never quite the same route twice.
Access is unusually plain for a landscape this severe. Road 221 leaves Route 1 and ends at a gravel lot where parking costs 750 ISK per car, a short walk from the ice. That proximity is why the glacier appears on so many South Coast itineraries out of Reykjavík, and why Sólheimajökull Glacier Hike & Ice Climbing tickets are among the most requested in the southern half of the country. The glacier is thinning. The interest in it is not.
13 hr
