July 2022 (ROTM #163) Southern Iceland

Iceland is an amazing country and I finally was able to fulfill a life-dream by spending several weeks there back in 2016. It’s surrounded by coastline, but swimming in the ocean was not an option for a number of reasons, water temperature being a key one! But it’s also a high energy coast exposed to large waves and most of the beaches have coarse volcanic black sand that makes them quite steep which can lead to nasty shore-break conditions. The high surf also leads to dangerous sneaker waves so you have to be careful even walking along the shoreline!

Some of the beaches also have rip currents. This one was taken by a drone as part of some coastal geomorphology work being done on the southern Iceland coast by a colleague of mine named Sebastian Pitman from the University of Newcastle in the UK. Seb has done a lot of great work on rips in the past including testing people’s ability to spot rip currents while on the beach, but just took this picture for some fun and posted it on Twitter (@CoastalScoop)

I’ve never quite seen rips like this. First, it’s a high-energy black sand beach situated on a barrier island formed as part of a glacial outwash plain (sorry, that’s my coastal geomorphology background coming out!). You can see the rip channels are ‘stranded’ higher up on the beach as the tide is low and you can spot them as the narrow and curved dark gaps all the way along the beach. Different and fascinating for sure, but not dangerous – nobody would be swimming here!

Black sand, glaciers in the background. Must be…Iceland!