Zdjęcia

Day 2 - Reykjavik - Vik

Still along the Route 1 near Skogar. This typically icelandic farm is situated bottom of a famlous glacier that put disorder to air traffic about 2 years ago : Eyjafjallajökull. Its icelandic name means something like the glacier on the mountains close to the islands, the islands being Vestmann. It is 78 km˛ large, which makes it the 6th biggest glacier in Iceland.

As it is the case for most of icelandic glaciers, Eyjafjallajökull covers a volcano named Eyjafjöll. It is not a very active volcano, only 4 eruptions are known. But the last one will long be remembered ! On march 20th 2010, Eyjaföll woke up out of a 187 years sleep. From april 14th an ash loaded eruption plume rose to 8 kilometres. The wind pushed ashes to Northern and Western Europe. This strongly disturbed air traffic until april 20th : closure of airspace in many countries in Europe, flight cancellations and a total cost of 1.5 to 2.5 billions euros ! Fortunately the eruption didn't cause further problems and it was over in october 27th 2010. So the eruption lasted 7 months and 7 days. Actually this eruption had not very important consequences in Inceland. Thanks to evacuation of population, no people died. The wind pushed the ashes away from Iceland and only the areas south of the volcano were covered with ashes. This was the case for this farm, and as you can see there is no more mark of this eruption. This point of view is now very popular among tourists visiting this area of Iceland !