White Christmas in July in the highlands

“Everything is submerged in snow here. Evenly precipitated snow has reached twelve to fifteen centimeters,” Ívar Örn Benediktsson, a glacial geologist at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland, told mbl.is today.

“It’s been snowing here all night and it’s still snowing.”

Scientists from the Icelandic Institute of Earth Sciences and the Icelandic Institute of Natural History are at Snæfell during the research of stratigraphy and landforms in the highlands in West Iceland and Brúaröröræfi.

Ívar was in Snæfellsskáli when a journalist called him.

“Where we are, wind is slow, breeze and flames are at times hard, and there is basically a really beautiful Christmas weather. The real thing, Christmas snow that you can hear when you walk on it.

Summer birds circling the hut

“We can just see the slopes of Snæfell and there is a maximum visibility of 500 meters.”

He says it is not unusual for it to snow in the highlands in midsummer, but he says the amount is unusually high now.

Some summer birds are circling the hut, pecking at the bread and grasses that protrude from the snow.

The forecast predicts snowfall to continue today, according to Benediktsson, although it should decrease with the evening.

He points out that if people are heading to Snæfell, they need to be wary of the problem.

“A track has been marked on Snæfellsvegur road now, but it might have been snowed over again.”