Men's Health, Bold Plated
1 May 2008
Once in a lifetime. The Silfra Crack
What?
Scuba dive the Silfra crack, a gap between the steadily parting American and Eurasian continental plates, which runs through the eerie Thingvellier Lake Lake in Iceland's beautiful Thingvellir National Park.
When?
You can dive all year but 24-hour darkness and plummeting temperatures in winter make the summer months of May to September the best time to go.
Why?
Aside from the Jules Verne fantasy and scuba club bar trump-card of diving between two tectonic plates, the lake's fed by glacial melt-water filtered through underground volcanic rock for decades, making it about the clearest on the planet.
How?
Black Tomato (blacktomato.co.uk) offers weekend packages from £999, including flights, transters, high-end accommodation, diving and a range of other activities including quad biking, snowmobiling and white-water rafting. You'll need to get your PADI qualifications before you go.
I'm wrapped in neoprene, breathing heavily, slightly hung-over and touching distance from the most powerful force on the planet. Suspended 15 metres below the surface of an Icelandic lake, I'm five metres from Europe, roughly the same from North America, and smack bang in the middle of a colossal rip in the earth's crust. I'm floating between two tectonic plates and struggling to get my head round the situation. It's like the moment you wake up on a strange sofa, as your aching eyes and bleary mind try to piece the clues together. Only amplified several times, with an aqualung thrown in. My head turns slow-mo through the sub-aqua panorama from one continent to the other. This is no ordinary scuba dive.
Beneath the Crust
As soon as I read about the "journey to the centre of the earth" as this dive into Iceland's Thingvellir Lake is billed by adventure specialist Black Tomato, I was hooked. Just going to Iceland was exotic enough - my mind was filled with visions of volcanoes, geysers and glacial ladies - but to dive an Artic lake, into a crack in the earth's crust. Wow! Maybe the wide-eyed wonder comes from growing up in England's grey-green suburbs, where eruptions are confined to the home end and the only plate activity happens at dinner. When the planet's continent-shifting, mountain-raising forces haven't been round your way for a while, those corners of the world where they're on display have a magnetic pull.
In the past that pull has had me staring into the crater of a Chilean volcano, watching sunrise from the summit of Kilimanjaro, and now it's brought me to this fissure in the freezing roof of the world. These days TV cameras let us spy on all the globe's remote treasures, but however high-def your screen it's not the same sat on your sofa. To get beyond the postcard you have to feel the sun on your back and the sand between your toes. Or in this case, feel the bite of the water on your fingers as it seeps into your wetgloves and see the final frontiers of two vast slabs of the earth's crust rising a few feet from your face. They're eerily still now, but "drifting" apart roughly two centimetres a year, motionless for centuries until enough tension builds to rip them apart in an earth-quaking wrench. Which my guide assures me the forecasters have calculated isn't on the agenda today. Hence I'm not back in Reykjavik nursing a stiff vodka. That was last night.
Rewind an hour and you find me arriving at Thingvellir lake not feeling ideally prepared for this much-anticipated slice of the life aquatic. I'm given a short briefing, but despite all my dive guide's reassuring professionalism, my pulse taps the accelerator as we don the drysuits. I'm not just worried about seismic shudders, I'm thinking about temperature too. August in Iceland doesn't get the mercury too excited, and my previous scuba experiences have been in rather balmier waters. It's my first time in a drysuit, and I'm wondering how effectively it'll keep the iced water out and my precious body heat in. Then there's the hood - slipping that little beauty on feels like a circus strongman attempting to cave your temples in. I wouldn't recommend it with a hangover. And the weight. With 40kg of tank, Buoyancy Control Device (BCD) and weight vest to counter my drysuit's buoyancy, it's like giving a sumo wrestler a piggy back and discovering he's surprisingly bony. I shuffle flippers over the soggy earth and make a shaky descent down the steps into the lake. Getting in the water is like savouring a slow collapse into a particularly comfy beanbag. One small step for a small man, a giant break from gravity.
Current Affairs
It's such a relief that I forget those fears of an impromptu freezing as I float in the glorious gravity-defying air bubble. The arctic handshake that sneaks into my wetgloves reminds me of the temperature issue, but it's not as bad as I was expecting and the rest of me is sealed, bone-dry and pretty toasty. I clean my mask, bite the rubber of the snorkel and spin to take a peak under the surface. We're in a narrow, shallow crack, no room to dive, so we snorkel until the floor drops away. I expel air from my BCD and sink below the surface. After tinkering to find neutral buoyancy - the point of equilibrium between sinking and floating back to the surface - I exchange okay signals with my dive partner and look around. I drift in the gentler current driven by water seeping in through underground wells. The clarity of the water is like a lens bringing everything into focus.
Decades of filtration through underground lava en route from the Langjökull glacier make it purer than a Songs of Praise special. At 100m (328ft), it's probably the best visibility in the world. So I scan submerged rocks and vegetation for the brown trout, Arctic charr and three-spine sticklebacks which scratch out their chilly, isolated existensces so successfully here that the fruits of their 10,000-year evolution have become the focus of research on species formation.
That Sinking Feeling
I'd always loved the idea of diving, from early viewing of unsynchronised limbs from the bottom of hotel pools to a geeky fascination with The Blue Planet. I got my PADI qualification 15 years back and dived the widescreen technicolour glory of the Great Barrier Reef, but my last foray under the surface was in the Gulf of Thailand a decade ago. I'd thought it was purely circumstance that I'd drifted away, but as a flashback hits me I'm not so sure. I remember that dive now, I was out of step with the whole enterprise for some reason, filled with clawing claustrophobic unease. Like being trapped on a crowded train, elbowed out of your comfort zone. I remember my breathing became quicker, deeper and more desperate. I knew I was taking more air than I needed, but I couldn't sate my appetite for the reassuring flow of oxygen in my throat. Eventually my greed cost me. I took more than the rather meagre ration my tank-fillers had calculated would see me through, and 18 metres under the Gulf of Thailand I ran out of air. I remember the claustrophobia intensifying, like another half dozen people shoving each other to get onto the train. And that memory floods back to me now. Suddenly I'm more keenly aware that I'm out of my natural environment, aware of the 15m (50ft) of water above my head and the smothering neoprene embrace of the drysuit. I feel myself tense, my heart quickens. I can hear the amplified robotic rhythm of my breathing accelerate. I sound like Darth Vader on the treadmill.
Let There Be Light
In Thailand I managed to stay calm enough to go through the requisite hand signals and secure my dive buddy's spare mouth piece. We "buddy-breathed" - a strange intimacy with a stranger - long enough to make a safe ascent to the surface. So no real danger, but I felt an intense vulnerability. And I feel it again now.
Back in the Arctic the seconds stretch, I'm half-paralysed, like the long wait before a sudden-death penalty. Then a stream of bubbles snaps me out of it. The manic beauty of their chaotic ascent, carrying stolen glints of sunlight past the Perspex of my mask is enough to turn my focus away from the internal darkness. I steady myself, rationalise the situation. I check my air gauge to re-establish that trust in my equipment. I take a couple of kicks with my fins, not to go anywhere in particular, just to restore a sense of control. And finally I take a not-quite-so-deep breath.
The tension lifts. I glance from side to side and I'm back in the moment, taking in the stark beauty around me. I drift on. With just enough elbow room between continents, the minutes roll by in pure escapism. I'm totally consumed by the scene, no thoughts of the outside, no internal fears to break the spell. In the quiet serenity I barely notice the passage of time. Then comes the moment that will remain forever etched upon my memory. The sun emerges from behind a cloud, bathing everything in a new light. I spin to look up at the surface, now a half-mirror reflecting the underwater scene below. Seconds later, ripples scatter the image and the sunlight breaks into a rainbow of colours. It's sublime. The light fragments about me in kaleidoscopes of chilled blues, and I swear I can almost sense the continents shift. It may not quite be the centre of the earth, but it's an image I'll carry back to my sofa in something far beyond high-definition. All I need to do now is lug the bony sumo out of the lake and I can start contemplating a celebratory shot of Iceland's other sublime clear liquid.
