Too Hot to Swim

The entrance is nothing — a crack in a low shelf of black lava in the middle of a flat field, with a couple of boulders you climb down between. Then you get your head under the overhang and the colour arrives.

The water in there is that particular geothermal blue that doesn’t photograph as a lie even though it looks like one: dead clear, so you can see every block of fallen basalt on the floor of it, and lit only by the daylight coming down through the split in the roof. Steam sits on the surface and drifts toward the light. The rock around it is torn — this is a fissure, not a cave that was carved, so the two walls still match each other where the ground pulled apart.

For a very long time this was somewhere local people came to wash and to sit in the warm. That ended in 1975, when the Krafla fires began a few kilometres north — nine years of eruptions and intrusions along the fissure swarm — and the temperature in here climbed past fifty degrees. It has been coming down slowly since, but the land belongs to a farm, bathing isn’t allowed, and standing on the edge in September I could feel why: the air above the water was the temperature of a bathroom after a long shower, in a country where it was five degrees outside.

A hot spring that got promoted to a hazard by an eruption nine kilometres away.

You get maybe two square metres of standing room and you share it with whoever else is down there. I waited for a gap, got low, and shot toward the light with the water filling most of the frame. Then I climbed back out into the cold and the field and the wind, which after ninety seconds underground felt like a different planet.