Tour a Volcano from Above and Below
November 4, 2014 - The 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull drew the world's attention to Iceland by disrupting air traffic for nearly a month. Today people from around the world are on waiting lists for tours to the country, ready to buy plane tickets the moment another eruption begins. Tours include visits to lava fields, flights over eruptions, and an "inside the volcano" trip down into an old magma chamber.
Transcript
Tour Volcanoes in Iceland Transcript
Sævar Freyr Sigurðsson, Owner - SAGA Travel
This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, your adrenaline is going to go up, this color of the eruption is a hotter color than you have ever seen before. It is alive.
Anton Freyr Birgisson, Adventure Tour Guide - SAGA Travel
We have got a lot of interest in the eruption Eyjafjallajökull which you remember maybe if your flights were cancelled somewhere around the world. A big part of the world at some point asked - what rock is that in the Atlantic that cancelled my flight because of ash of a volcano? And that definitely started a lot of talk about the potential of our volcanoes and the geology of Iceland.
My feeling is that what people want is the proof that it is actually real, that's the sensation, the first time that you see an eruption, you think - it is actually real, right? It seems to surreal when you see all these videos and all these photos of it.
Tourism around active volcanoes will always be difficult. We don't know that much about volcanoes. We cannot really predict what's going to happen next, the scale can be different from one eruption to the other. It's hard to have civilians in an area that's uncertain if the entire ground is going to break up and explode. You might sell tours or ask people to come months in advance and then the eruption stops. What then? Is the site not interesting anymore, or is it only the eruption that people would like to see?
Dogg Armannsdottir, Tour Guide - Inside the Volcano
This is the first time that we are also working in September and now there is an extra interest because of the eruption up north outside of Vatnajökull.
It's really nice to come here and be able to live it and be kind of inside what is happening up there.
There are people that come from all over the world to see inside the volcano. I mean this is the only place in the world that you can actually go into a magma chamber.
Einar Danielsson, Guide - Inside the Volcano
Tourism is changing in that way, here it's increasing. Just the fact that Iceland, we have a big open area, untouched nature and so people are aware of that and we have more people who appreciate that.
Anton Freyr Birgisson, Adventure Tour Guide - SAGA Travel
This eruption hopefully puts us Icelanders into understanding that we need to have framework around what we're going to do when it erupts. There's a lot of solutions we just have to coordinate and find the right one and I'm pretty sure we'll do that in the next months. We have to.