Newer Than the Road

The first thing is the noise, or rather the specific lack of it. A lagoon full of ice is not silent — it ticks. Air that has been compressed inside the ice for centuries gets to the surface and comes out, and the whole basin makes a sound like a cold room settling.

I got down onto the black pebbles at the outlet end, where the smaller pieces come in on the tide and ground against each other. Big bergs out in the middle, blue where they’ve rolled and shown their wet side. The glacier itself is a white line on the horizon and it is a long way off — which is the point.

This lake is younger than the paved road that runs past it. In the 1930s Breiðamerkurjökull started retreating from the moraine it had been sitting against, and the meltwater filled the hollow it had dug. The lagoon has been getting deeper and wider every decade since; it is now the deepest lake in the country, and the glacier is still going backwards. Every one of those bergs is a piece of that retreat, floating around for a year or two before it drains out under the bridge and into the Atlantic.

A landscape that is visibly, measurably running. You can see it in one lifetime.

Most of what I photograph is a building being slowly taken apart by weather. This is the same process at a scale where the weather wins in decades rather than centuries, and where nobody is even pretending to argue about whether to save it.

It was mid-afternoon and cloudless, which is not the moody light this journal usually wants, and I have decided I don’t care. The blue on a clear day out there is not a colour you can talk yourself out of.