Diving in Iceland

Iceland has a beautiful unique geography. The landscape is distinct and you feel like you’ve stepped onto another planet or back in time. The closest thing I can compare it to is the tops of Norwegian mountains; rocks, moss and nearly treeless. It is very strange to see so much empty space without any trees. Naturally growing trees in Iceland are very rare and resemble bushes more than trees. A joke I heard in Iceland explains this phenomenon quite well; “what do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest?” the answer “you stand up”.
During my short stay in Iceland I took the opportunity to dive one of the world’s top ten dive sites, the Silfra Rift. The site is about a 45 minute drive from Rekjavik and lies in Thingvellir National Park, which is a UNESCO world heritage site. Silfra is actually a crack/fissure in the face of the earth between the American and Eurasian continents, and is filled with melted glacier water from a glacier 50km away. The water travels underground through lava fields for years before it makes it to the crack, and the temperature is consistently 1-3C all year round. Because of this the visibility is amazingly clear (100m+). In fact, the water is so pure that you can actually drink it at any point during the dive (and it was quite tasty)!
My dive buddy (Jo Henrik) and I arrived at the site on Saturday. It was about 4C outside, but cloudy and very windy with blowing rain/snow. Luckily this dive site isn’t weather dependent! We suited up in our drysuits and gear (which included 14kg of lead) and walked down the pathway to the entrance of the water. This is not an easy task with so much gear in this weather, so it was a relief to finally get into the water and become weightless. The water was beautiful! Not much life (I saw one tiny 2 cm minnow), but definitely an experience to dive in a fresh water 2 meter wide crack between the continents! The crack reaches a max depth of about 40 meters in the open, but there is also a cave that goes to about 60 meters. On this dive we simply followed the length of the crack, and maxed out at about 19 meters depth. The dive itself was easy, as there is a gentle current that pushes you all the way through the length of the fissure. During our 43 minute dive we managed to have a look at some neat caverns and swam over and around rocks in the path (you simply can’t just descend down and swim the crack all the way through, as there’s lots of rocks you must swim up and over, so you’re constantly changing depths). At the end of the crack we arrived in the Silfra lagoon, which is just a shallow (about 5 meters deep) open area. Our dive ended shortly after that, which I was thankful for because at this point I was very, very cold and my hands weren’t functioning well anymore. We then managed to walk the ~100 meters back to the van with our gear on through the rocks and squishy moss (it was a quick way to warm up) and relaxed with some nice hot chocolate. This dive was definitely a check off the list!
Unfortunately though, it was our only dive on this trip to Iceland. We had planned to dive the hot springs in lake Kleifarvatn on Sunday, but it had been canceled due to the bad weather (high winds brought waves that made visibility too poor to dive in). Guess we’ll try it next time! Nevertheless, it was a great quick trip to add a little excitement to the long boring jump-less winter for us.