My head falls from my hand and I am wobbled awake by the texture of the road beneath our tires. It's our third day in Iceland, and as I look around at the other nodding heads on our bus, I recognize the comfortable sleep that comes from the good kind of tired. We've been working our muscles with the extra weight of snowshoes strapped to our feet, and our faces are slightly chapped from the cold, but all of us this morning are wearing subconscious grins as we wait out the long dark morning on the daily ride to our next destination.
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We drive quickly through the dawn because we will only have four hours today to drink in sunlight. We will spend these hours as we've spent the other hours of daylight on this trip: we will snowshoe, and we will blend into the falling snow, and we will see where ice forms over waterfalls, and where lava fields peak through the snow. All of this land is made of miracle, and the whiteness here fades into the sky until the clouds part and everything is pastel. Pinks, blues, yellows. It is worth the darkness
The beauty of Iceland is in danger
Iceland, circled by the food-rich currents of Atlantic, Arctic, and polar waters, is the Serengeti for fish-eating birds. Its rocky coast, hillocky fields, and jutting sea cliffs are breeding grounds for 23 species of Atlantic seabirds, hosting an indispensable share of Atlantic puffins, black murres, razorbills, great skuas, northern fulmars, and black-legged kittiwakes. But the nests have gone empty in the past few years, and colonies throughout the North Atlantic are shrinking. The suspected culprits are many. But the leading candidates are the array of profound changes under way in the world's oceans-their climate, their chemistry, their food webs, their loads of pollutants.
Warming oceans and earlier thaws are driving away the seabirds' prey; unleashing deadly, unseasonal storms; and knocking tight breeding schedules off-kilter. Mounting carbon dioxide absorption and melting glaciers are acidifying and diluting the aquatic balance, jeopardizing marine life and the creatures that depend on it for food. Alarmed scientists have returned from fieldwork throughout the North Atlantic with sobering descriptions of massive chick die-offs and colonies abandoned with eggs still in the nests. "Mass mortality of kittiwakes is evident," said Freydis Vigfusdottir, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter in Cornwall, England. "You can see in the late summer lots of 'chick pancakes' in the nest." And in the Arctic tern colonies she's studied, "there are just dead chicks everywhere," she said. "Not only do you have to provide your field assistants with food and shelter, but also some psychological help after many, many days of collecting dead chicks."
What's next ?
The country hopes that when people book their first post-pandemic flights overseas, Iceland will be the top choice. It also aims to learn from the recent past, when tourist numbers soared. In a normal October, the Radisson BLU Saga Hotel in Reykjavik would be buzzing with tourists hoping for a glimpse of the Northern Lights, business travelers in town for trade fairs, honeymooners gearing up for a tour of Iceland’s waterfalls and geothermal spas. This year, of course, things are very different.
“It’s surreal,” said Ingibjorg Olafsdottir, the hotel’s general manager. “It’s completely quiet.”
Since March, even with government support, Ms. Olafsdottir’s staff has shrunk from 140 to just 16. The hotel, which has more than 200 rooms, normally has an occupancy rate of above 75 percent, but it fell to 11 percent in September. “It’s been emotional,” Ms. Olafsdottir said, adding that, even after cutting down to bare-bones operations, the hotel continues to rack up debt. “But the thing is, I think everybody is in the same boat here.” But while visitor numbers are low, Iceland is positioning itself for a major tourism rebound after the pandemic. The government is investing more than $12 million in tourism infrastructure, while improving roads and harbors across the country.
Economically, tourism came to account for 8.6 percent of gross domestic product and 39 percent of the country’s total export revenue. Roughly 30,000 people — nearly 16 percent of Iceland’s work force — were employed in the tourism industry in 2018.
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