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The Svinafellsjokull lay in front of me, a thick glacier tongue coming from way up the mountains and falling into a narrow valley with steep und high flanks and ending in a small lagoon. A brilliant place and a scenery that up to now I only knew from the alps. I couldn´t believe that I was standing a few meters above sea level and the ocean was just behind me.
Back on the Ring Road and heading south again the road turned away from the mountains and headed straight into the alluvium. Just about one kilometre into this vast nothingness I stopped at a large parking besides a bizarrely twisted large piece of steel that might have been a beam of some now undefinable construction.
From an information panel at the parking I learned that this steel girder was part of the remnants of a large bridge that had crossed one of the wide rivers running down from the glacier to the sea. The bridge had spun about 160 meters and was washed away during a massive flood during the eruption of the submerged volcano in 1996. The girder was found way down the river buried in sand and now tries to give an impression how violent the forces of nature can become here.
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For more impressions from the Svinafellsjokull check this gallery
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