High in the highlands

The Eimskip Calender

The Eimskip calendar 2002

Toyota ad´s

Exhibitions

Jeep travels in the snow

Links

Arctic Books

Exhibition in Gerdarsafn

  

Chasing the aurora
 

It ‘s 12.30 in the night and the thermometer dives to about 13°C below zero but biting winds make it hover around the 30’ ies below.

 


Photographer Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson and Ari Trausti Gudmundsson geophysicist take shelter behind the oversized Arctic Truck Toyota and wait. The skies are dark and clear and filled with stars except for the southeastern part where a full moon outshines everything else in all its might. The moonshine reflects in frozen ponds and braids along the glacial river Skei_ará. It´s absolutely quiet, save for the hissing of the wind.
The Skei_arársandur flood plains stretch from the margin of the Skei_aárjökull outlet glacier to the sea, some 30 kilometres away, draining a part of the vast ice cap behind. The plains are flat and almost deviod of any vegetation and in the dead of winter no birds venture across, maybe except for a solitary raven or a fulmar. The plains, all the 700 square kilometres, have been laid out by numerous meltwaterfloods from subglacial eruptions within the Vatnajökul ice cap as well as by the meandering glacial rivers, that deliver the normal meltwater from the outlet glacier, loaded with mud and sand, into the North-Atlantic Ocean. The two last ash-producing eruptions were in 1996 (Gjálp) and 1998 (Grímsvötn central volcano) and the former caused a powerful meltwater food (glacier burst) to sweep the sand plains. The discharge was up to 50,000 tons per second and the total flood volume exeeded 3 billion tons, leaving thousands of huge icebergs on the plains to melt.

 
 
 

Now, there are few remaining signs of this news-making event to be seen on Skei_arársandur. But the white domes of the ice cap loom in the moonlit background reminding any visitor that eruptions of this magnitude may occur once or twice each decade in Vatnajökull. In front of the pair, however, rises Iceland´s highest and largest volcano: mt. Öræfajökull (2,119 m), clad with steep alpine glaciers which reach almost to sea level. The crevassed snow and ice surfaces glisten in the white to yellowish light and there is little to tell that this powerfull volcano has sent thick plumes of ash and pumice over the countryside and poured fierce meltwater floods across the sand plains, in 1362 and 1727. Occasionally, frozen ice surfaces nearby crack or creak, but apart from that there is no sign of life or nature in motion around the two, save again for the wind. They talk, they put up cameras and they drink steaming coffee to keep awake. And wait.
Suddenly Ragnar leaps to his cameras and, yes, the skies start to light up with glooming green, yellow, blue and red lights that dance acroess the ice-clad horizon. The Northern Lights are on, the aurora borealis illuminates the heavens. In a few minutes the skies become ablaze and Ragnar clicks and works fast with three cameras; exposure time is long so that it´s better to have more than one camera. Ari Trausti is at first on the lookout for more motives, then he starts to write this report on the computer in the truck. In some 15 minutes or so, the light begins to fade and in 20, only stars pierce the darkness above.



Then, Ragnar and Ari Trausti wait again …they wait once more…