Original subtitles

Iceland, the largest volcanic island on earth

otherworldly panoramas sculpted

by the spectacular clash of fire and ice.

Home to fierce volcanoes and powerful glaciers,

the two always at odds.

It's a bubbling cauldron of scalding steam,

Exploding geysers and breathtaking falls,

Where fantastic fireworks of lava

Eternally battle the crush of ice.

This Titanic struggle makes Iceland

the most geologically magical island on the planet.

Iceland, a land of stark contrasts

that lies in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean,

about 200 miles east of Greenland,

on the edge of the arctic circle.

Just 300 miles wide, it's roughly the size of Kentucky.

This lone, rugged island is

a place of extreme natural beauty,

Created, in large part, by its violent, volcanic heart.

Iceland's 30 active volcanoes generate

1/3 of the world's land-based lava.

It's an island on fire.

On average, Iceland experiences

a volcanic eruption every five years.

Lava has laid waste to great belts

of the interior, creating twisted landscapes.

Just 1/5 of this hostile land is inhabited by humans.

200 earthquakes shake the island each year.

All over Iceland, steam hisses,

Water erupts,

and lava spews from the mantle,

deep beneath the earth's crust.

April 2010, eyjafjallajokull,

an 800,000-year-old volcano in the southern reaches

of Iceland, unleashes its terrible power.

For 39 days, the formidable volcano spews ash

toward the sky, creating a plume that soars

more than six miles into the atmosphere.

The mammoth cloud of ash creeps across Europe,

bringing global air travel to its knees.

Eyjafjallajokull is by now our most famous volcano,

and mainly of course because of the problems

that it caused during its eruption in 2010,

when people were sitting in airports

all over the world, cursing this mountain.

Billions of dollars are lost

as the world is forced to watch and wait.

Looking at it was, it was scary.

The mountain itself is big, and you could clearly hear

the explosions and the rumble from this massive thing.

And the plume of ash, even though the mountain was big,

it was dwarfing the mountain underneath.

Looking at something so large,

and there's absolutely nothing you can do

about it, is not a good feeling.

When nature takes over, you just have to sit and wait.

But this is a country

that was built by volcanoes.

And to this day, volcanoes continue to shape the land.

So what makes this rugged island

such a colossal volcanic force?

What inflames this lonely outpost in the North Atlantic?

Geological clues are everywhere.

At thingvellir plain in the southwest of Iceland,

a giant gash in the valley floor bears witness

to the intense violence that has shaped the island.

We are standing within a fault

that has been slowly moving apart in the last 9,000 years.

This is a basaltic lava wall

that's been torn apart from this one.

Some 9,000 years ago, they were together,

and as all these years have passed,

they are slowly moving apart.

You think about the powers that are needed

to tear apart this landscape.

That is mind-boggling sometimes.

Iceland is quite literally tearing apart

at the rate of one inch per year,

about the same speed that fingernails grow.

The island is getting larger.

Here in this cracked valley, something powerful is at work,

a geological juggernaut that runs right through the middle

of the island, the mid-Atlantic Ridge.

It's one of earth's longest mountain chains,

yet it's almost entirely hidden beneath the sea.

Running about 10,000 miles from the South Atlantic

to the north, it's the boundary

between north america and eurasia,

two plates of land that were once joined together.

Driven by forces deep within the earth,

the continental plates tear apart, moving east and west.

What you're looking into here is

basically the side of North America.

It's probably one of the few places in the world

where you can look into the side of it.

On the blackened lava plains

of the reykjanes peninsula,

a 50-foot steel footbridge spans a broad fissure.

The bridge, named for the Icelandic explorer leif Erikson,

allows visitors to symbolically walk

the distance from eurasia to North America.

For more adventurous explorers, there are places in Iceland

where the edges of the north American

and eurasian continents are within touching distance.

The silfra tectonic fissure on the rim

of thingvellir lake provides a unique opportunity

for underwater explorers to float between continents.

In the narrowest reaches of the fissure,

divers can touch both north america and eurasia at once.

This is the only place in the world

where you can stand in the North Atlantic dorsal rift.

It's a Ridge that goes from north to south

through the whole Atlantic Ocean,

and it only rises to the surface here in Iceland.

So actually it's unique because we are

in between two tectonic plates and we are standing.

Normally, you have to be 4,000 meters depth in the ocean

to stand in a place like this.

The water in silfra is

among the clearest and cleanest in the world,

The result of a remarkable natural filtration process.

Water trickles underground from a melting glacier

30 miles north of the dive site.

The glacial meltwater percolates

down through porous lava rock before it wells up

from underground Springs directly into silfra,

a process that can take between 30 and 50 years.

This naturally-filtered, crystal-clear water has made

silfra one of the world's top dive sites.

But with temperatures that hover at 35 degrees year-round,

it's not for the faint of heart.

Diving in silfra is not easy at all.

It's quite cold and it's quite demanding.

Your body needs to burn a lot of energy to stay warm.

More than one hour is not recommended,

not even with the best of the suits,

because you lose your heat very fast,

it's very cold, and it can be dangerous.

It's a fissure which is very narrow,

so it can be a little bit claustrophobic.

Once you put your face in the water and you get to see

how clear the water is, everything is worth it.

Everything makes sense.

Evidence for the powerful forces driving

these tectonic changes is everywhere.

At grjotagja, in the north of Iceland, in a deep abyss,

a hot spring beckons, heated by magma deep within the earth.

Water in this shimmering cave pool simmers

at more than 120 degrees, too hot for bathing.

Hot Springs like this are pivotal

to understanding how the island formed.

Some mighty force is heating the water from far below.

That same force has pushed up the seabed

and, with it, the mid-Atlantic Ridge,

more than a mile above the sea floor.

But what is it?

Iceland sits on what's known as a hot spot,

a plume of scorching molten rock

believed to be 100 miles wide and 400 miles deep.

A similar plume lies beneath the Hawaiian island chain.

Lava, erupting from the hot spot,

cooled and accumulated, gradually building

an island above the sea, this island of fire.

Fueled by powerful volcanic forces

from below, Iceland continues to grow.

But there is one force powerful enough

to challenge Iceland's fiery heart, ice.

About two and a half million years ago, a massive ice sheet

descended from the north and smothered the island.

Whole of Iceland was covered with ice

and the big ice caps, Greenland and Antarctica,

were quite a bit bigger than they are at present.

And that means that the sea level was

about hundred, 110 meters lower than it is now

because all the water was stored in the ice.

1/3 of the planet

lay trapped under a blanket of ice.

Then, about 12,000 years ago, the ice sheet

loosened its grip and began its retreat.

Today, 11% of Iceland remains covered by glaciers,

great rivers of slow-moving ice.

Spread out, they would smother

the entire island in an icy cloak 100 feet thick.

Iceland's glaciers hold more than 800 cubic miles of water,

enough to fill Michigan's lake huron.

Inch by inch, these frozen monsters

power their way down the island's mountains.

This is vatnajokull, the largest glacier in Iceland

and the greatest glacial mass in all of Europe.

It covers most of southern Iceland.

The glacier is so immense, it generates its own weather.

Cold winds blow off the ice cap, chilling the valleys below.

Vatnajokull is constantly transforming.

As it pushes through the valley,

it melts in the bright daylight,

then freezes during frigid arctic nights.

Crevasses, cut open by friction

as the ice slumps down the mountain, can plunge

more than 100 feet into the glacier's icy heart.

But the crushing mass of ice meets

an equally powerful force pushing ever upwards.

60% of Iceland's active volcano systems

lies underneath its glaciers.

And when the two forces meet,

it can produce some dramatic results.

Grimsvotn, it has the highest eruption rate

of any volcano in Iceland.

In 2011, it unleashed its fury

for the fourth time in 14 years.

Torrents of molten rock surged through shattered ice sheets,

hurling a billowing cloud of steam

and ash 12 miles into the sky.

Believed to be the most violent eruption

in Iceland since the 1960s, it plunged

parts of the island into near darkness.

The two forces at play, fire and ice,

when mixed, are a power to be reckoned with.

You have the super-cold glacier

and the super-warm lava,

and when the eruptions take place under the glaciers,

first of all, the heat from the eruption

starts melting the glacier from underneath.

And in some cases, the eruptions are big enough

and last for long enough to melt

their way all the way through the ice.

And then we have this magnificent display

of fire just coming out of the ice.

They're kind of battling each other.

The explosive showdown between lava and ice

can wreak havoc in other devastating ways, flooding,

triggered by the eruption of a volcano beneath a glacier.

Eyjafjallajokull, the 2010 eruption melted the glacier

and sent two billion cubic feet

of water gushing down the mountain,

Nearly the volume of water that goes

over Niagara Falls in six hours.

The flash floods, which are known in Iceland

as jokulhlaup or the glacial floods,

they will go down and onto the lowlands

and cause a lot of damage wherever they go.

They basically ruin everything in their path.

Iceland's glacial floods

are enormously destructive.

Raging torrents of water wash away roads.

At the foot of vatnajokull lies the twisted wreckage

of a steel bridge, wiped out by glacial flooding.

Glacial floods carry millions of tons

of dark volcanic rock called basalt

to Iceland's south shore, reshaping the coastline

and creating stretches of beach as black as gunmetal.

It's because it's all produced

by breaking down basalt, which is a black rock.

And most of the rock, the majority of rocks in Iceland

are black in color because most of it is basalt.

So we have this dark color.

I remember one time going to Hawaii

and everyone talked about the black sand beaches.

"You need to go and see the black sand beach,"

and I said, why?

I've seen nothing but black sand beaches in my life.

I'm from a place where all the rocks are dark.

At sandvik beach, towering cliffs are

home to thousands of sea birds, including puffins.

More than half the world's Atlantic puffins breed

on Iceland's rocky clifftops,

lured by dense shoals of herring and hake.

Although the north coast of the island

touches the arctic circle,

its coastal waters remain free of sea ice.

A warm ocean current driving up from the Caribbean,

the Atlantic Gulf stream,

heats this passage of the North Atlantic.

But with warmer water comes rain.

This stretch of coastline is one of the wettest in Iceland,

with average annual rainfall of more than 90 inches.

Isolated near the top of the world, Iceland is ravaged

by fierce winds and roiling Atlantic waves.

Through the centuries, scores of mariners

have drowned in its stormy waters.

Even today, there is real danger for the Icelanders

who harvest these cold, dark seas.

For hundreds of years, Iceland's fishermen

have braved the Atlantic Ocean.

The connection between the people

living in these villages

and the ocean is very, very strong.

It is their livelihood.

And sometimes in some areas,

especially close to the south coast,

where we have the rough surf of the Atlantic hammering

the coast, going out in the boats to catch the fish

has always been a big challenge.

They have to go through the surf sometimes,

and even today in the big fishing boats

and with all the technology, this is often

a very dangerous and difficult thing to do.

So these are tough people and they have learned

to survive with this giant, the Atlantic Ocean.

The tectonic force that drove Iceland

above the Atlantic waves continues today,

As volcanoes erupt and magma from deep within the earth

rises to the surface to create new land.

Iceland is forever being reborn, something those who live

in the shadows of the volcanoes have learned to live with.

These volcanoes that are close to where people live

are monitored quite carefully so that scientists

and the authorities can predict

if something is going to happen and they can issue warnings.

But usually when they do so, if they do issue warnings,

the farmers, they already know

because they can judge by the behavior of their animals.

They seem to sense this way before we do.

The geology is alive here.

We have volcanic eruptions.

You can watch the lava moving.

You can watch the plumes come up,

and so it seems to be alive.

Nowhere is this living, breathing earth

more evident than here, in the southern lowlands,

where the earth's inner furnace boils over.

This heat powers fantastic fountains

That soar into the Icelandic twilight.

This tranquil pool belies its name, geysir,

but it was once home to an explosive geyser.

It was the first natural geyser known to Europeans.

In Icelandic, geysa means to gush.

It is from this place

that the world's geysers take their name.

The nearby geyser, strokkur, is far more active,

erupting every eight to 10 minutes.

It explodes from vents in the earth's surface

that run deep into the crust.

These hydrothermal eruptions are

the result of cold rainwater seeping

down through fractured bedrock onto hot volcanic rock below.

The water trapped underground is super-heated

to temperatures as high as 280 degrees fahrenheit.

It converts to vapor that would normally fill

1,600 times more space than the original volume of water.

But it remains trapped under intense pressure.

As the steam explodes from this subterranean furnace,

it passes through liquid groundwater near the surface,

which jets more than 60 feet into the air.

On the flank of an active volcano,

steaming fumaroles hiss into the cold Atlantic sky.

Fumaroles are vents in the earth's crust

similar to geysers

yet they emit steam, not water.

Volcanic gases such as hydrogen sulfide

and colorful minerals in the ground paint

the geothermal field with an almost extraterrestrial beauty.

The hydrogen sulfide rising through surface water produces

sulfuric acid, strong enough to dissolve

the surrounding rock and soil to create boiling mudpots.

Icelanders harness this energy

by boring into the ground for the steam,

which spins turbines to generate geothermal power.

The geothermal power plants that we have produce

about 30% of the energy that we have in Iceland.

Of course, it's brilliant to be able

to produce energy in a green way like that.

There's no or hardly any pollution

and it's a very green way to keep life in Iceland going.

There's always the downside that in order to create

those power plants, you have to build structures

and you have to drill and you have to have pipes

on the surface, so there are mixed emotions

when it comes to these power plants.

But Iceland is hardly lacking

when it comes to pristine beauty.

Its great sculptor, ice, has created

fabulous works of natural art,

none more breathtaking

than Iceland's magnificent glacial valleys.

These canyons formed when glaciers pushed

slowly through channels already cut by flowing streams.

Year after year, decade after decade, century after century,

a glacier eats away at the sides of the original valley,

transforming a narrow gully into a wide and mighty canyon.

Meltwater from the glacier now feeds

the stream that flows through this valley.

Clearly too small to have created this majestic canyon,

it's known as a misfit stream.

These humble streams merge together to form

powerful rivers, which in turn generate

another erosive force that has shaped Iceland,

Waterfalls.

Iceland's climate and topography combine to create

some of the most stunning waterfalls in the world.

On some parts of the island, waterfalls outnumber people.

In this North Atlantic climate,

snow and rain frequently drench the land.

High in the mountains, melting glaciers feed

frigid rivers already swollen from precipitation.

Over dozens of miles, these glacial rivers

gather pace and volume.

Finally, they roar over rocky cliffs.

At selfoss, an endless flow of glacial meltwater

cascades over the Ridge, battering the rocks below.

More than 30 feet high, selfoss generates immense power.

But it is a trickle compared to what lies downstream.

Dettifoss.

150 feet high, 300 feet wide,

it is the largest waterfall in Europe,

powerful enough to fracture solid rock.

Early Icelanders called dettifoss,

the king of all waterfalls.

On an average day, enough water cascades over its crest line

to fill an olympic-sized swimming pool every five seconds

in warm weather, which boosts meltwater,

or on rainy days, even more water is unleashed.

Dettifoss is a magnificent display

of the power of water.

It's a breathtaking thing to see,

and when you're standing next to it,

not only can you, of course, see it and hear

the rumble from the water, but if you touch

the rocks around it, you can feel them trembling.

So the power there is just unbelievable.

The river that feeds

the largest waterfall in Europe is in turn fed

by the largest glacier in Europe, vatnajokull,

which lies more than 100 miles south of here.

At the top of dettifoss, the force of the water is

powerful enough to Polish rocks flat and smooth.

At the bottom, the basin becomes larger,

as rushing water and sediment wear away at the rock,

causing the waterfall to recede upstream

an average of a foot each year.

And it's slowly carving the canyon

that we have below the waterfall.

So, in time, it's slowly moving further inland,

carving the rock that is underneath.

So that's another form of Iceland being

Not only have Iceland's waterfalls sculpted

its ever-evolving landscape, they've also played

a pivotal role in shaping its culture.

Godafoss, in north Iceland, is closely connected

to one of the most influential events

in the country's history, the conversion from paganism

to christianity in the year 1000.

According to legend, Iceland's law speaker,

himself a pagan priest, was faced

with a growing religious crisis

between those who worshiped the old nordic gods

and believers in the newly-arrived Christian religion

the law speaker declared Iceland would become Christian.

In a symbolic act, he hurled statues

of the old norse gods into the falls,

hence its name, godafoss, the waterfall of the gods.

Here, water joins fire and ice

as the great sculptors of the island's singular vistas.

In the ongoing construction project that is Iceland,

powered by volcanoes capable of wreaking great chaos,

sometimes lava spills from the earth

to create formations so uniform,

So ordered, that they appear manmade.

At reynisfjara, Iceland's southernmost beach,

thousands of basalt columns stand

300 tall above the slate-gray sand.

The question that has puzzled people for centuries,

how did a volcano produce such precise geometric structures?

The answer comes down to the physics of cooling.

Columns form because when the liquid lava cools down,

it contracts, and so the solid lava, it has a volume

that's roughly about 10% less than the liquid lava,

and so it accommodates for this volume change by forming

these joints which are demarcated as columnar joints.

So you form the columns because of this contraction,

and they're usually hexagonal in form.

This astounding basalt fortress,

believed to be formed during the last ice age,

has withstood eons of weathering and erosion.

But another legacy from the ice age

is losing its battle to survive.

The ice cap is vanishing at an alarming rate.

5% of Iceland's glaciers have melted in the last 40 years.

Each year, 11 billion tons of ice disappear from the island.

The glaciers are estimated to be melting

at a rate of three feet per year.

So this glacier is actually moving quite fast.

During the last hundred years, it's been retreating

very rapidly, so now it's further back

than it has ever been in the last 20 years or so.

Since early '90s, all the glaciers have been retreating

and losing mass quite rapidly.

Svinafellsjokull,

one of the largest outlet glaciers

at vatnajokull, advances down the mountain

at a speed of 80 to 100 feet each year.

But despite this immense forward push of ice,

summer melting causes its leading edge

to recede more than 130 feet annually.

Great swaths of the valley, once enveloped by the glacier,

now lie exposed as vatnajokull retreats up the mountain.

It is a grim reminder that the glacier is dying.

At the foot of the great vatnajokull,

Iceland's largest glacier, lies a vast lagoon.

Here, huge chunks of ice have broken off,

or calved, from the glacier.

Calving begins with a fracture in the edge of the glacier

caused by erosion from wind, water or melting ice.

When the crack penetrates the full depth of the glacier,

the sheer weight of the ice takes its toll

and huge blocks break away, creating icebergs.

As temperatures rise and ice weakens and melts,

more and more bergs crack away from the glacier.

As the ice sheet breaks apart,

lagoons swell and flood the lowlands.

These cast-off ruins from vatnajokull's dwindling ice cap

provide a glimpse into the future

of all of Iceland's glaciers.

We have done some modeling

for the Icelandic glaciers,

and taking some assumptions about how the temperature

is gonna increase in the future,

we see actually quite a bleak future for the glaciers.

So most of them will probably be gone

in about 200, 250 years.

The prospect of a glacial collapse is

a disturbing one for the people of Iceland.

Locked inside the ice caps is

their largest reservoir of fresh water and power.

If all the glaciers would disappear entirely,

it would have very negative effect on our water supply,

And not only in form of the drinking water that we need,

both hot and cold water, but also the fact that 70%

of the energy that we have in Iceland is produced

in hydraulic power plants by damming the rivers.

So they are a very, very big part of

or important part of our lives.

Were all of Iceland's glaciers

and ice caps to disappear,

Not only would it lose water and power, but it could result

in a completely different kind of catastrophe.

Geological evidence from the last ice age suggests

that volcanic eruptions in Iceland increased

30-fold after the glaciers retreated.

Scientists estimate a glacial collapse

could lead to a major eruption every seven years.

Eruptions on this scale can lead

to local and global disaster.

In 1783, an eruption at laki in south-central Iceland sent

a poisonous cloud of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.

The thick fog of fumes plunged Iceland into famine,

then spread over Europe and beyond,

possibly killing an estimated two million people worldwide.

It was one of the deadliest volcanic eruptions

in human history.

As Iceland's glaciers continue to melt,

atop some of the world's most dangerous volcanoes,

the threat of eruptions increases.

Some geologists believe a massive natural disaster,

similar to laki, could happen again.

There will be another one like that

in the future, yes.

Every now and then, about thousand years apart,

we get huge eruptions,

which will even affect greatly modern society.

We'll probably have a much better way of

defending ourselves

than people had then, when 10% of the people died

from the famine and the results of the haze.

But there may very well be volcanic eruptions

that will affect the whole society of Iceland,

in such a way that it will hardly be habitable.

The vast laki lava field, which laid to waste

more than 200 square miles, is a reminder

of the horror that befell Iceland not so long ago.

In this land of contrasts, where fire and ice

never cease to battle, light and dark

have their own brilliant war dance.

On this night, a cosmic spectacle unfolds,

Aurora borealis, the northern lights.

Electrically-charged particles of solar wind collide

with the earth's magnetic field, creating one of nature's

most elusive and spectacular sights.

Iceland is renowned as one of the best places on earth

to catch a glimpse of this awe-inspiring light show.

The sun rises over a landscape like no other.

Born of geological violence,

rising from a great gash that tears the world in two,

and seated atop a bomb of molten earth,

Iceland's eternal war of volcanic heat

against arctic cold plays out,

exploding,

Spouting, hissing,

Bubbling, and cascading.

This land of spellbinding contrasts is

a constant reminder never to take nature for granted

on this island that breathes fire

And ice.