Svínafellsjökull Glacier

About Svínafellsjökull Glacier

Svínafellsjökull glacier is an outlet tongue of Öræfajökull, the ice-capped volcano on the southern edge of Vatnajökull, ending in a gray meltwater lagoon just east of Skaftafell in Vatnajökull National Park, Southeast Iceland. Few glaciers in Iceland let you stand this close to the ice after a two-minute walk from the car.

Its crevassed icefall and dark moraines have stood in for other worlds on screen, including scenes in Interstellar, Batman Begins and the lands beyond the Wall in Game of Thrones. From the Svínafellsjökull viewpoints you see the blue and black bands in the ice up close, along with bare valley walls that show how far the glacier has shrunk in recent decades.

You can look, but you cannot walk on it. In 2018, Iceland's Civil Protection advised against all travel on the glacier after cracks were found in the Svínafellsheiði mountainside above it, and it asks visitors to stop only briefly at the viewpoints by the glacier tongue. The Icelandic Met Office's 2025 hazard assessment puts the moving rock at possibly more than 60 million cubic meters, so guided hikes in the area now run on neighboring Falljökull instead.

To get there, turn off Route 1 onto a short gravel road a few minutes' drive east of the Skaftafell visitor center, about four and a half hours from Reykjavík. A marked path leads from the small parking lot to the viewpoints in a few minutes, and 20 to 30 minutes is enough for the stop. The viewpoint is reachable all year, though the gravel road can be icy or rutted in winter.

Svínafellsjökull fits easily into a day with Svartifoss and the Skaftafell trails, and it is on the way east to Fjallsárlón and Jökulsárlón. For a view from above, helicopter flights from Skaftafell trace Svínafellsjökull and neighboring Skaftafellsjökull below the peaks of Öræfajökull.