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The Blue Lagoon in Iceland

In March 2012, I visited Iceland with my team from work and for our activity day we went to the Blue Lagoon for a swim. It was March and, as illustrated by the photos above, snow blanketed the ground, and it was freezing! The water was lovely and warm, and you’d be fine as long as you kept as much of your body in the water as possible!

I’m revisiting this trip today because of the concerning news from Iceland. There have been numerous earthquakes, and magma is building up, only 800m underground and very close to the Blue Lagoon and the Svartsengi Geothermal Power Plant. The ground has risen by 8cm because the magma is pushing it up. The nearby town of Grindavik has been evacuated as a fissure runs through it. Earthquakes have already caused serious structural damage to buildings there.

Data shows the “magma tunnel is significant, and it is approaching the surface” according to this video. The tunnel is about 15km long. It seems likely there will be an eruption very soon.

Edit on December 19th: it finally erupted. You can see it on this live cam. This video shows the vantage point from a helicopter. The erupting fissure is 3.5km long!

Flames erupting from a volcanic eruption in Iceland.

An erupting volcanic fissure with lava spewing out of it.

Aperture	ƒ/9
Camera	Canon EOS 40D
Focal length	18mm
ISO	100
Shutter speed	1/200s

The Blue Lagoon

The Blue Lagoon, Iceland. The water is lovely warm, even quite hot in places and is full of silica and sulphur. There’s usually a smell of bad eggs in the air from the sulphur but when we visited it was definitely bacon we smelled. Really weird. A great experience except when hailstone started to fall. Those things can really sting your ears and face. The rest of you will be safely and warmly under water.

Check out John’s great photo at the Lagoon too.

If you visit Iceland you have to visit here!

The warm waters are rich in minerals like silica and sulphur and bathing in the Blue Lagoon is reputed to help some people suffering from skin diseases such as psoriasis.[1] The water temperature in the bathing and swimming area of the lagoon averages 37–39 °C (98–102 °F). (via)

PS. This was edited in Aftershot Pro as well. I used cloning layers to hide some blemishes, and an adjustment layer with and exposure of -1 to darken the sky. I figured out how to use the polygon tool in the layers menu to select only the sky and mask off the rest of the photo. I think it worked rather well!

Aperture	ƒ/9
Camera	Canon EOS 40D
Focal length	18mm
ISO	100
Shutter speed	1/200s