Jökulsárlón

Where it sits. Jökulsárlón lies on the south-east coast of Iceland, directly beside the Ring Road, roughly 60 kilometres east of Skaftafell and 75 west of Höfn. It is a proglacial lake at the snout of Breiðamerkurjökull, an outlet glacier of the Vatnajökull ice cap, and it drains to the Atlantic through a short, fast tidal channel spanned by a single bridge on Route 1. The lake now covers about 25 square kilometres and is over 240 metres deep, which makes it the deepest in Iceland, and it is still growing. The whole site sits inside Vatnajökull National Park, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2019; the Icelandic state bought the farm Fell, which included the lagoon, in 2017.

How new it is. Nothing here is ancient. Breiðamerkurjökull reached its greatest extent around 1890, when its snout stood barely a kilometre from the sea, and the lagoon only began to form in the 1930s as the ice pulled back. It has quadrupled in area since the 1970s and the glacier front continues to retreat by a few hundred metres a year. Icebergs calve from a wall up to thirty metres high, drift with wind and tide, ground on the shallow bar at the outlet, and eventually wash out to sea, where the surf throws stranded blocks back onto the black sand at Eystri-Fellsfjara — the beach everyone now calls Diamond Beach. The ice comes in two registers: milky white where air is trapped in it, and a dense blue where it is not, sometimes streaked charcoal by ash layers from historic eruptions. Seals hunt fish carried in on the tide, particularly in winter; Arctic terns and great skuas nest on the outwash plain of Breiðamerkursandur behind the lake.

On screen. Four productions of note have used the lagoon, and two of them are Bond. A View to a Kill (1985) opened with a pre-title sequence set in Siberia in which Roger Moore's Bond escapes across the ice and departs in an iceberg-shaped submarine; the material was shot here and on Vatnajökull above. That film had an unexpected consequence for the region: commercial boat tours on the lagoon began in 1985 in the wake of the production, run initially by a local operator with two small vessels, and grew into the amphibious-vehicle and zodiac fleets that carry hundreds of thousands of passengers today. Die Another Day (2002) went further and used the lagoon frozen. A second unit under Vic Armstrong arrived on 25 February 2002 to film the ice chase between Pierce Brosnan's Aston Martin V12 Vanquish and Zao's Jaguar XKR; the Vanquish stunt cars were rebuilt with four-wheel drive and a 300 bhp Ford V8 for traction. The ice was only about 25 centimetres thick, crew numbers on the surface were rationed and everyone on it wore a survival suit; one roll-over stunt judged too dangerous for the lagoon was completed months later in England. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Batman Begins (2005) also filmed in this landscape.

What you actually see today. Two car parks flank the outlet bridge, with a café, toilets and tour desks on the west side. The standard experience is a slow circuit of the lake by amphibious vehicle or, for closer work, by zodiac, running from roughly May to October depending on ice conditions. In winter the same car park is the meeting point for guided ice-cave trips into Breiðamerkurjökull and Vatnajökull, which can only be entered with a guide and only while the ice is cold enough to be stable. Diamond Beach is a five-minute walk under the bridge, and the ice there changes daily. Nearby Fjallsárlón, ten kilometres west, is a smaller and much quieter version of the same phenomenon.

Practical cautions. The lagoon looks benign and is not. Icebergs roll without warning, the outlet current runs hard and cold, and the shore ice is undercut; people have been carried out by rip currents at Diamond Beach and stranded on floating ice. Walking onto the ice is prohibited. The ring road crossing here is single-lane at the bridge and the site's popularity has forced parking charges and traffic management; the road authority has been planning a replacement bridge as the outlet widens.

Getting there and timing. Reykjavík is around 375 kilometres away, a five to six hour drive, and Höfn an hour east has the nearest airport and a good spread of accommodation. Summer brings midnight light that turns the ice pink at one in the morning; the autumn and winter months bring aurora reflections on the water and the ice-cave season. The lagoon is exposed and cold in any month, with wind coming straight off the ice cap.