Just outside my toddler’s room, a vivid blue print of Iceland’s Crystal Ice Cave from 2015 adorns the wall. Captured by my friend Þorri during one of my visits over the past two decades, the image now serves as a cherished memory of a place long gone.
My son frequently stops to look at the print. At about 18 months old, he recognized the color as “blue.” Two years later, he could effortlessly pronounce “Breiðamerkurjökull,” the glacier’s name. Nowadays, he regularly inquires about the glacier’s well-being, as if it were another family member. How is Breiðamerkurjökull today? Is it sad, hungry, happy, or okay?
These questions quickly become complex. As both a writer and glacier scientist, I’ve dedicated much of my career to studying this glacier, exploring its changes, and assessing its global impact on humanity.
Breiðamerkurjökull, stretching 8.5 miles wide and 28 miles long, is Iceland’s third-largest glacier and is undoubtedly not okay. Between 1982 and 2020, the glacier retreated nearly 3 miles. This rapid and unnatural melting has led to the formation of moulins, or ice caves, within its body.
Now, I find myself stalled in the hallway, pondering the vanished ice cave and responding to my son’s insistent questions.
I hesitate to explain the accelerating melt, glacier loss, or climate change right before snack time and playtime. So, I nod and tell him Breiðamerkurjökull is doing fine.
He runs off, singing with joy, while I lean against the doorframe, contemplating.
Ice caves captivate not just my son but many others worldwide. They are breathtaking and otherworldly. This fascination is part of “last-chance tourism,” where people rush to see vulnerable environments before they are irrevocably changed, creating an industry that monetizes this desire.
‘To some, entering a passageway into a glacier is absurd and dangerous. To others, it’s a fast lane to adventure and awe — or even wealth.’
However, exploring today’s climate-affected glaciers comes with significant risks.
In 2024, these dangers turned deadly when an ice cave on Breiðamerkurjökull collapsed, traumatizing Icelandic responders and tourists. A young pregnant woman was critically injured, and a 30-year-old American man, eager to see the ice, lost his life.
Þorvarður Árnason
In August 2024, while on a National Geographic assignment in Iceland, I was alerted to the ice cave accident through a flood of text messages. Being a National Geographic expert, I’ve spent over a decade traveling globally to explain environmental science.
As I was about to enjoy my fourth latte of the afternoon in Siglufjörður, a friend in Reykjavik messaged me: “Did you see the ice cave accident?”
Another message from a colleague in Akureyri asked, “M, are you OK?”
‘A boom rang out. A crack.’
Iceland, although a vast and chilly volcanic island, is a tight-knit community. News travels fast, and soon, everyone in the coffee shop was glued to their phones, absorbing the shocking news from the south.
I joined them, texting friends in the glacier industry to check on their safety.
“Yes,” confirmed one. “It’s on the west side where we don’t operate.”
“Yes,” said another. “I don’t work ice caves in the summer.”
A friend from Reykjavik informed me, “All rescue available on the way.”
As I exchanged more messages, I noted the names of those who were safe: Einar, Haukur, Step, Helgi, Laufey, Óskar, Helga.
“The cave in Breiðamerkurjökull caved in. With people in it.”
“Helicopter pilot says 25 people on the tour.”
“The ice wall fell over four people.”
“I have heard one dead and some injured and some still stuck inside the moulin/ice cave.”
“Fuck.”
For those unfamiliar with ice caves, they are hard to believe until experienced in person. Their stunning blue hues evoke Neptune’s heart, and visitors often react with tears, laughter, or silent awe.
I taught my son about glaciers using a children’s book, Angela’s Glacier. By the time he could speak, he knew that a glacier is a moving mass of land ice and snow persisting year after year.
Ice caves are part of this “moving mass of land ice” but rarely last more than a year or two. The ice cave in my hallway photo and the Blue Flame ice cave that collapsed in 2024 have both melted away.
Glaciers are dynamic, constantly changing, growing, and melting. In summer, when the glacier’s surface is exposed, the ice undergoes a phase change, turning into vapor or meltwater. This water flows until it finds a weak spot in the ice, creating tunnels.
My preferred glacier text defines an ice cave as a large cavity formed by meltwater beneath a glacier, emphasizing that “roof collapse is common.”
To some, entering a glacier is absurd and dangerous, while to others, it’s an adventure or even a path to wealth.
Understanding the complexities of Iceland’s ice cave industry can be overwhelming. It involves a web of local and Reykjavik-based companies, third parties, park services, and personal relationships, all woven into a volatile network filled with conspiracy theories, guide conflicts, and financial irregularities.
This is quite different from what is marketed to the millions of tourists visiting Iceland each year to experience the glaciers and ice caves.
The industry today is not how it began. When I first visited Iceland’s south coast in the early 2000s, tourism was modest. Summer activities included small glacier walks or tractor rides to see puffins, while winter tourism was nearly nonexistent. The adventurous and affluent could hire a local alpinist, Einar Rúnar Sigurðsson, to guide them up Iceland’s tallest peak, Hvannadalshnúkur, or explore winter glacier features.
In 2010, two events transformed Iceland’s tourism landscape. The Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted, grounding European air travel for six days and showcasing Iceland’s scenic beauty on a global stage. That same year, Instagram launched, introducing a new wave of tourists eager to capture the island’s wonders on their smartphones.
Tourism in Iceland surged. By 2024, nearly 2.3 million visitors arrived in a country of almost 400,000 residents, outnumbering locals six to one. This influx of tourists rented hotels and cars, hired guides, and supported a tourism economy valued at around $3 billion in 2024 alone.
Breiðamerkurjökull became the focal point of glacier tourism, largely due to its proximity to Jökulsárlón, a proglacial lake filled with photogenic icebergs right by the main road.
“In 2024, we had 1 million people visit Jökulsárlón,” a park service ranger told me. “We had 1 million people, and 11 toilets.”
The ice cave industry has evolved dramatically due to this surge in visitors and profit potential.
Initially, ice cave tours operated during a conservative four- to five-month window from November to March, when the ice was mostly snow-covered and temperatures were consistently cold. Companies communicated to ensure a positive experience and operated within their capacities.
“Everybody just invests in a big jeep and makes a year’s labor out of four months,” one company owner told me in 2016.
Over the past decade, this window has expanded, driven more by financial incentives than scientific guidelines. By 2025, about 30 licensed ice cave companies charged around $200 per person, catering to groups of 14 tourists per guide, with two or three daily departures. Whether in Icelandic krona or U.S. dollars, the figures quickly reach millions and billions.
With such financial stakes, extending the ice cave season beyond the original 120-day winter window seemed inevitable. What began as a strictly observed safety period gradually extended by weeks, then months, until it became a year-round activity, repackaged and marketed in various forms. The rules governing these tours vary widely across Iceland.
Regardless of one’s stance in the glacier knowledge ecosystem—whether as an ice cave company, guide, ranger, tourist, or researcher—the science remains unchanged: Ice caves are erosional and inherently unstable glacier features, never truly static or stable.
Icelandic glaciologist Magnús Tumi Guðmundsson and colleagues first highlighted the dangers of ice caves in 2017. They reiterated their findings seven years later when it became evident that the warnings were largely ignored. Both reports argue that ice cave tours should never occur in the summer, as these features primarily serve as conduits for significant and unpredictable water flows. The reports list various dangers, including sudden ice collapse, meltwater flooding, hidden shafts, avalanches, toxic gases, and more. If ice cave tourism is to be permitted, it should only occur in winter when conditions are marginally more stable, with no visible flowing water, thawing, recent rain, or warm weather. Such conditions must be assessed by an expert or a guide with a certain level of training.
When I asked my glaciological colleagues for their thoughts, one seasoned ice core scientist laughed, stating that ice caves, at any time of the year, are “never a 100 percent safe feature to go into,” adding, “you couldn’t pay me enough to go in one in the summer.”
Guðmundsson told a local paper not long after the collapse, “They are playing with fire. If you go climbing on your own or with friends and decide to explore a cave, taking the risk is a personal decision. However, there is a fundamental difference between someone doing something on their own and selling a trip to people that you claim is safe, but is not.”
This issue extends beyond individual judgment to the broader system in which such decisions are made.
‘What do those cuts mean, to the glacier itself — to a glacier already imperiled, already melting at unnatural rates?’
Even in the industry’s early days, locals mentioned the pressures they felt from mass tourism. The focus shifted from providing a unique glacier experience to accommodating tens of thousands of paying customers each season.
Companies operated at maximum capacity, then pushed beyond it. Initially, they expanded group sizes, then added more departures. One tour a day became two, then sometimes three. Growth was increasingly driven by non-local operators and third-party booking platforms, which pressured local companies to fulfill reservations. Larger companies based in Reykjavik—those appearing prominently in Google searches for “ice caves in Iceland”—began operating their own tours, bypassing local partners.
Eventually, the pressure wasn’t just about group size or departures but the length of the ice-cave season itself. A once strictly observed safety window was forced open—first by weeks, then by months—until year-round access became the norm, feeling not exceptional but expected.
I asked a park ranger how Vatnajökull National Park defines an ice cave—a question with significant implications since the park manages all glacier tourism within its boundaries. “We call an ice cave a cave that is under the ice,” he said. “That term, it can be stretched.”
This open secret circulates among those familiar with glacier tourism.
Today, ice cave companies not only operate beyond recommended seasonal limits but also take additional steps: If they find a small feature in a glacier—a hole, cavity, or crevasse—they “augment” it, enhancing it.
In other words, they are making ice caves.
Guides have long performed safety work for visitors, such as cutting steps into ice or removing hazards. However, several individuals from different companies described the use of generators, drills, blowtorches, chainsaws, and other heavy equipment on the glacier. One explained, “If a cave shows up in a day, you know there’s heavy equipment. … This community is small. Everyone knows who’s using power tools.”
“What we say is we do ‘access’ work to make it safe for clients,” a seasoned guide explained.
Glaciers are constantly changing, and even I’ve pushed, chopped, and cut ice for safer access during my research. But where do we draw the line? As a glacier scientist and a human being, I can’t ignore the question of what a gas-powered blowtorch does to a glacier’s physical body, or a set of Makita drills, chainsaws, or heavy excavation equipment.
What do these cuts mean for the glacier itself—already imperiled and melting at unnatural rates? Is this violence? Desensitization? Just business? Is the scale too small to matter?
Or is this about respecting what’s left of our glacier systems, refusing to inflict further harm?
More questions arise: When does an ice cave stop being an ice cave and become a construction project or a marketing campaign?
In Reykjavik, tourists can visit Perlan to explore a fully man-made ice cave, complete with blue lighting and piped-in cold air. No one pretends it’s natural. But shouldn’t a wild glacier’s ice cave be natural? When a glacier is drilled, blowtorched, and inaccurately marketed to meet demand, what exactly is being sold? Where does our responsibility lie?
The Blue Flame collapse occurred on Breiðamerkurjökull’s western side, an area some locals say has been entirely surrendered to mass tourism.
In the months leading up to the collapse, many described a tense atmosphere, largely due to the relentless influx of summer tourists and pressure from external companies. Every company had to decide: Would they risk running ice cave tours during the hot summer?
Ice Pic Journeys, co-owned by Americans Mike Reid and Ryan Newburn, chose to take the risk. On Sunday, August 25, 2024, two guides from Ice Pic, one of whom was new to glacier guiding and not yet certified, were assigned an afternoon trip with 25 tourists. The group met at Jökulsárlón, traveled as close to the ice as possible, parked, and donned helmets and crampons.
Another tour company was already at the ice edge, heading to Blue Flame. In a police statement, the guides noted that two other companies had visited the cave in previous days for “maintenance work.”
The Ice Pic group approached Blue Flame, tourists awkwardly navigating their crampons. By all accounts, it was a typical and pleasant late summer day. Balmy. One guide proceeded ahead of the group to improve steps into the ice cave. Then, the entire group descended, passing a large overhanging ice wall.
When I later reviewed photos of the scene, the ice’s color struck me. It was dirty, covered in seasonal sediments—dark black particles that retain heat and accelerate surface melt. The ice itself appeared mostly white, typical of summer surface glacier ice actively ablating. It felt airy, like styrofoam—not dense like typical glacier ice, which is so compressed it expels air and scatters short wavelengths of light, appearing blue to our eyes. This Blue Flame ice exhibited barely any blue.
This distinction is crucial. Ice like this melts from its surface and interior. It is not stable.
However, the Ice Pic tourists were likely unaware of this, as were the guides. So they spread out. One tourist, an American from Austin, Texas, visiting with his 10-year-old daughter, walked around and ascended to the glacier’s surface, gaining a view into the ice cave. Two other Americans, a couple celebrating their first wedding anniversary, posed for pictures directly in front of the ice wall. The two Ice Pic guides met with a
