Inside Iceland’s Langjökull glacier

No self-respecting writer goes anywhere without a notebook, but mine was getting horribly soggy. Fat plops of water landed square in the middle of the page, rendering my scrawl even more undecipherable than usual – but right now, notes were the least of my worries. I suspected the ceiling was melting – and we were only 10 metres into the ice tunnel.

“Ah, no, it’s just glacial run-off,” grinned my guide Orri as I squinted up at the roof, dodging a drop in the eye. “It’s not the ice melting – it’s nothing to be worried about. There’s no danger of the ceiling collapsing.” Good job too: above our dripping cavern, 40 metres of snow and ice lay between our heads and the surface. If the ceiling fell in, we’d be toast.

Langjökull glacier should, strictly speaking, be out of bounds. For centuries, Icelanders have kept as far away from its ice as possible, telling tales of trolls and ‘little people’ to deter their children from venturing onto its frozen slopes. It’s only in recent years that tourism has touched Europe’s second-largest ice mass, with snowmobile trails and 8-wheel monster truck tours crossing the white – but I was one of the first travellers to actually explore inside the glacier.

I snapped my notebook shut and squinted into the gloom. It didn’t look like much so far – in fact, outside was much more impressive. We’d arrived at the tunnel’s mouth in blazing sunshine, a rare cloudless day that made the snow dazzle. It had taken just 30 minutes to reach the entrance in lurching 8WD ice trucks – retired German missile launchers, converted into 12-gear glacier-crossing beasts. We rattled around in the back, wrapped up in ski jackets, squinting into the sun as our ears popped and the cold crept into our boots.

Above the cloud line, black mountain ridges jutted through the glacier up into the cerulean sky, and the air was crisp and pure – up here, we could see across snow, mountains and scrub-strewn flatlands to Iceland’s west coast, to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, over 100 miles away. The ice-covered peak of Snæfellsjökull volcano glinted on the horizon.

We pulled on crampons, our breath clouding the air, and slipped into the cavern – the entrance marked by a simple metal sign stuck in the snow. Away from the sun’s glare, the tunnel seemed dark at first, but it transformed in front of our widening eyes. Hundreds – maybe thousands – of LED bulbs are nestled deep within the ice, their blue and white light glistening through the walls. I’d worried about feeling claustrophobic, but the tunnel walls were high – although drippy – and wide enough to accommodate four people.