Letter from Iceland #87
The "tragedy in the Wild West, glacier style" edition
From over here in Normandy I have been following the horrible news of the man killed when part of an ice cave collapsed in Breiðamerkurjökull glacier last Sunday. His partner, who is pregnant, was seriously injured in the accident. Both were part of an organized tour with a company called Ice Pic Tours.
Ice cave tours, which are popular with tourists to Iceland, are a fairly new thing. I can’t remember when they first began to be offered, maybe a decade or so ago. I have never been on one, but have had this vague idea that there was a growing number of touring companies offering them. Personally they have never interested me, partly because I find the thought of being inside a glacier pretty damn scary. As an Icelander I am conditioned to stay away from glaciers, as they are unpredictable and dangerous, constantly shifting and moving, with deep cracks and crevices that will swallow you whole. I have heard of enough accidents on them to make me very averse.
Initially these tours were only offered in wintertime. it was deemed unsafe to provide them in the summer because of melting, and the instability of the ice. My sense of their increased availability turned out to be correct, there are now many companies that offer these tours, and it seems that some of them have been drilling into the ice to access meltwater caves that are created in the summer (if I understand it correctly) in order to sell tours year-round.
And Icelandic regulators have been sleeping on the job. This awful tragedy has called public attention to the complete lack of regulation of the ice cave tour business. It’s the Wild West out there, with greed appearing to be the motivating force. The incident last Sunday brings all this into sharp focus.
The man was killed when a large block of ice collapsed and he was crushed beneath it. Initially it was thought that two other people had landed under the ice as well—
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