Lauren Rebbeck
I am always chasing the next thrill. And when I saw that Iceland was doing its volcanic thing a few years ago, as the North Atlantic island has a habit of doing on the regular—theatrically tossing orange dreamsicle–hued lava into the air and flexing its fiery flows—I promptly booked a flight for a closer look.
For years, I’d wanted to visit the Nordic country that’s steeped in Viking lore and known as much for its active volcanoes and gushing thermal geysers as for its glacial lagoon, where icebergs wash ashore like blue gems at the aptly named Diamond Beach.
Helicoptering over an erupting volcano felt like something out of a movie. But as a diver, there was one underwater adventure I wasn’t leaving the country without trying.
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Iceland is home to one of the most unique dive sites in the world, which you can reach by car in about an hour after touching down at Keflavik International Airport.
The country sits directly on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an underwater mountain range that makes a spine of a boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, rising above the water in only a few places in the world—including here.
For divers (and snorkelers) who don’t mind braving waters hovering between 35 and 39 degrees year-round, the best place to get a glimpse of these tectonic plates, where they’re slowly drifting apart from each other, is within Thingvellir National Park. At the site called Silfra, a slow current guides you gently through a gaping underwater fissure filled with crystal-clear spring water that cracked open during an earthquake in 1789.
To say the experience is otherworldly is selling it short. It’s very much of this world, but like no place else.
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And for a moment there—where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates towered above me and where I hovered as if in some geology class far more interesting than any I ever took in school—it felt like I was having an out-of-body experience in water as clear as air.
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With some effort, I could twist my head, cinched into a thick neoprene hood, to gaze up at my sister and a friend snorkeling on the water’s surface and clad in drysuits, just like I was. They looked like astronauts defying gravity in an infinite universe, and it was almost impossible to tell how close or near they were to me—or where the water’s surface ended and the blue sky began.
The flow we were moving through—meltwater from the Langjokull glacier and filtered through lava rocks for decades—was so pure we could have sipped it. Visibility at Silfra is said to be the best in the world, pushing the 300-foot mark. But you can’t really imagine this until you see what that means with your own eyes. My lips were too frozen to even smile when I surfaced. But somewhere between the numbness and the neoprene, I’d never felt more alive.
