chasing.pink · Journal · Iceland

Fire & Ice

Reynisfjara·Vatnajökull·Jökulsárlón—Iceland · winter

Scroll

Iceland doesn’t pick a side. It is the argument between fire and ice held open — a volcano asleep under a glacier, a beach made of ground-up lava, a lagoon calving icebergs into the sea. And above all of it, a sky that can’t decide either: green most nights, and, a few nights a year, red.

Everything here is young and unfinished — the land still cooling, the ice still moving, the light still arriving eight minutes late from a star that will outlast all of it.

The land was fire first.

63.4°N · volcanic south coastbasalt · lava · red light

Reynisfjara black-sand beach and the Reynisdrangar sea stacks — 01Reynisfjara — a beach the colour of what made it.

Reynisfjara is a beach with no sand — or rather, sand that used to be lava, ground black and fine by a sea that never warms. The basalt columns stack like something built, though nothing built them; they cooled into hexagons on their own, the way honey does, the way a planet does when it’s in a hurry. Offshore the Reynisdrangar stand where a story says two trolls were caught by the sunrise and turned to stone.

The waves are the ones the signs warn about — sneaker waves, cold enough to stop a heart and indifferent enough not to notice. You keep your back to the cliff and your eyes on the water.

Black and white: the Reynisdrangar sea stacks and the Reynisfjall cliff, seen from Vík — 02The Reynisdrangar from Vík — the trolls of the story. Stone keeps no colour.

Sand that used to be lava, ground black by a sea that never warms.

The whole south coast is this young — lava that hasn’t finished becoming anything else, ground down grain by grain but not yet gone. You walk on the newest old ground in Europe, still warm somewhere underneath.

And when the sky joins in, it borrows the same colour: on the strongest nights the top of the aurora turns red — fire, a hundred kilometres up.

A lava boulder among grey pebbles on the black coast — 03The newest old ground in Europe — lava, still becoming sand.

Red aurora over a green band, a dark ridge below — 04The sky borrows the beach’s red.

And then the ice took its turn.

64.0°N · VatnajökullEurope’s largest ice cap

◆ Vatnajökull on the atlas →● Iceland aurora forecast →

Vatnajökull glacier and snowy peaks — 05Vatnajökull — a glacier the size of a country’s patience.

Vatnajökull covers eight percent of Iceland and hides seven volcanoes beneath it — fire and ice not as a slogan but as a stack, one directly on top of the other. Where its tongues reach the lowland they crack into blue — a blue that isn’t pigment but pressure, the last colour light can escape after everything else has been squeezed out of the ice.

At Jökulsárlón the glacier finally lets go. Icebergs the size of houses drift across a lagoon toward the sea; the sea, unimpressed, hands the smallest of them back — scattered across the black sand like a jeweller’s tray tipped over. The locals call it the Diamond Beach. For once the tourist name is the honest one.

Chunks of glacial ice on black sand, surf breaking behind — 06The Diamond Beach — ice on lava sand; the whole argument in one frame.

Sunset over the lagoon’s outwash plain — scattered ice, photographers silhouetted on the ridge — 07The lagoon’s mouth at sunset — everyone waits for the light.

The glacier tongue cracking into blue — 08Where the tongue cracks into blue.

A blue that isn’t pigment but pressure.

Jökulsárlón lagoon at last light — 07Jökulsárlón at last light — the ice going gold before it goes.

III

The sky settles it — or refuses to.

the aurora over Icelandgreen · and, rarely, red

Green aurora curtains over Iceland — 08Green, most nights — the ordinary miracle.

Most nights the aurora is green — oxygen glowing a hundred kilometres up. You learn to read it: a grey smudge that a camera turns emerald, then a band, then a curtain that finally lifts and moves like it’s being poured.

But a few nights a year, when the storm is strong enough to reach higher and thinner air, the top of the curtain turns red — the same red as the beach, the same red as the lagoon’s last light. On those nights Iceland stops arguing. Fire and ice and the sky all agree on one colour, and hold it, for as long as it lasts, which is never long.

Red and green aurora corona — 09The night it all agreed on one colour.

Nothing here
has finished cooling.

The volcano under the glacier is only sleeping. The ice is only pausing. The light is only passing through, on its way from a star to your eye, borrowing the colours of the ground on the way down. You come for the aurora. You leave having watched a planet still deciding what it wants to be.

The full roll

Photo gallery

21 frames · Iceland
tap a frame to open

Fire & Ice · Words & photographs · Yiğit Yüksel · Iceland

Share this story

WhatsApp X Facebook

The Market Cold

Swedish Lapland · February

Read the story →

All stories →