Snorkeling Between Tectonic Plates in Iceland

3 min readNov 11, 2018

The mountains and hills of Iceland captures a lot of imagination, but have you thought about going snorkeling in Iceland? Maybe it’s time to add it to your bucket list.

Located in Þingvellir National Park, Silfra is one of the most famous dive sites in Iceland. This is where the story starts. Snorkeling between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, through century-old, crystal clear glacier water.

Silfra is about an hour away from Reykjavik. There are multiple tour groups that operate snorkeling — we went with a company called DIVE.IS.

A quick note here, while DIVE.IS supported my tour, my opinions here are wholly my own. I can only speak on my experience with DIVE.IS but there are many other tour groups.

With most of the tour groups, you can either opt to meet at the dive site or get picked up at one of a couple locations in the city.

The drive with our guide was one of our favourite parts of the entire tour. Our guide pointed out landmarks for us, the history of the Þingvellir national park, and the areas that marked the tectonic plates.

These facts gave context and weight to where we are. It became much more than a snorkeling tour. It became the difference between, “I snorkeled in water” and “I snorkeled between two tectonic plates, how cool is that”. Near the Silfra fissure is Alþingi, where the national parliament of Iceland and one of the oldest parliaments in the world, was founded.

Diving at 10:30PM

10:30PM — In the water, it was definitely cold. But not as cold as we thought. Imagine snorkeling at 10:30PM at night, in Iceland. But even at 10:30 at night, the sun was still out. The benefit of the Icelandic Midnight Sun in June. Underwater, the lighting as perfect even as it’s raining above water.

The water was as clear as advertised — this was centuries old glacier water that just had trickled down. Silfra is said to have the clearest water in the world.