A lake that didn't exist 100 years ago, frozen solid on purpose for a James Bond car chase
1933
Glacier began retreating from the sea
284m
Deepest lake in Iceland
18 km²
Current size (was 7.9 km² in 1975)
100m/yr
Glacier's average retreat
The Story
This entire lagoon is younger than your grandparents. Until 1933, the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier reached all the way to the ocean — there was no lake here at all, just ice meeting sea directly. Then the glacier began retreating rapidly, and the space it left behind filled with meltwater, forming Jökulsárlón. It's grown enormously even within recent memory: from 7.9 square kilometers in 1975 to roughly 18 square kilometers today. The glacier itself keeps retreating by about 100 meters a year — partly from a warming climate, but accelerated further by something specific to this lagoon: ocean water flows in at the outlet, and that warmer saltwater melts the ice from below twice as fast as fresh water alone would.
The lagoon's fame really took off in 1984, when the crew of the James Bond film A View to a Kill came here to shoot a chase scene meant to look like Siberia — using real boats to navigate the icy water. Those boat tours outlived the film and are still one of the main ways to see the lagoon up close today. Nearly twenty years later, Die Another Day went even further: the production actually built a temporary dam across the lagoon's narrow outlet to the ocean, deliberately blocking the seawater that normally keeps it from freezing solid — just so Pierce Brosnan and a stunt Aston Martin could have a proper car chase on the ice.
A movie crew dammed a glacier lagoon so a fictional spy could drive a car on it.
Jökulsárlón has also shown up in Batman Begins, Interstellar, and Tomb Raider — a landscape genuinely too strange-looking for filmmakers to resist.
As You Walk Around
Easy to miss if you're not looking
Cross the road to Diamond Beach and actually get down to the black sand. The ice chunks that wash ashore here have been polished smooth and clear by the ocean — genuinely look like scattered diamonds against the black volcanic sand, especially with good light.
Watch for wildlife you might not expect. Arctic terns and skuas nest nearby (they'll dive-bomb anyone who gets too close), and seals are occasionally spotted in the lagoon itself.
No two visits look the same here. Because the glacier and ice are constantly shifting, the lagoon's exact shape and iceberg arrangement changes daily — what you see is genuinely unique to today.
Fun Trivia
Things most visitors don't know
It's the deepest lake in Iceland — 284 meters at its deepest point, a genuinely startling number for a lake that's barely a century old.
The lagoon normally can't freeze over because of the seawater mixing in — the frozen-solid version you'd see in Die Another Day was entirely artificial, created just for that one film shoot.
Icebergs here can be blue, white, or streaked black. The black streaks are volcanic ash, compressed into the ice from eruptions that happened long before the ice calved off the glacier — you're looking at frozen evidence of past eruptions.