Upstairs, right outside my toddler’s room, hangs this striking, blue-blue print of an Icelandic glacier ice cave: the Crystal Ice Cave, circa 2015, long since vanished. My friend Þorri took the image and gifted it to me during one of my many stays over the last 20 years.

My son visits the print often. When he was about a year-and-a-half, he pointed to it and confirmed, “blue.” Add two more years and the name of the glacier, “Breiðamerkurjökull,” rolls off his tongue. Lately, just like he asks about my husband and me and our cats and the mailbox and the couch, he asks about the glacier in the picture. How is Breiðamerkurjökull feeling today? Sad? Hungry? Happy? OK?

This gets fraught quickly. I’m a writer and a glacier scientist — I’ve spent the bulk of my career working on, in, and around this particular glacier system, trying to understand what is happening to it, how people and communities respond to its changes, and how the future of this glacier impacts humanity worldwide.

And Breiðamerkurjökull — this huge sweep of snow and ice some 8.5 miles wide and 28 miles long, Iceland’s third-largest glacier — is decidedly not OK.

Between 1982 and 2020, nearly 3 miles of this glacier’s physical body dissolved away into the sea. This current rate of melt is rapid and unnatural, and as it accelerates, more tubes and tunnels form within the glacier body, what we call moulins in glaciology but everyone else calls “ice caves.”

So now I stand frozen in my upstairs hallway, looking at the long-dissolved ice cave and trying to answer the impatient tap-tap of my son’s foot.

I don’t want, in this moment before snack and Bluey and playground, to ruin his day and mine. To tell him about accelerating melt, about glacier loss, about climate change.

And so I just nod. I tell him Breiðamerkurjökull is feeling OK.

And then he’s off, running down the stairs, shout-singing, and I’m sagging in the doorframe.

My wee son is far from the only person to be captivated by ice caves. They’re among the most stunning, otherworldly, transcendent places on Earth. People worldwide are drawn to experiencing them, a quest paradoxically made more possible and more perilous by climate change. This desire for ice caves is part of a much larger phenomenon known as “last-chance tourism”: that impulse many people have to see — and consume — fragile environments before they irrevocably transform in our lifetimes. Unsurprisingly, an entire industry has emerged to monetize this desire.

But venturing onto, or into, today’s climate change-shaped glaciers carries very real dangers.

Those dangers became fatal in 2024, when an ice cave on Breiðamerkurjökull collapsed. Scores of Icelandic first responders and park service rangers and tourists were traumatized. A young pregnant woman was hospitalized in critical condition. And a 30-year-old American man, who just wanted to see that blue-blue, was killed.

It was late summer in Iceland, August 2024, and I was on assignment with National Geographic. For over a decade, I’ve worked as a National Geographic expert, traveling across all seven continents to translate environmental science for diverse audiences.

At the time, I was traveling with a group in the north, near the famed fishing village of Siglufjörður, and was about to tuck into my fourth latte of the afternoon when the text messages came flooding in. It was a friend in Reykjavik: “Did you see the ice cave accident?”

Another ping, from a colleague in Akureyri: “M, are you OK?”

Iceland, at its heart, is a small community on a big, chilly volcanic island. People generally know one another and it’s a safe place, which explains why, even though I was in the north, my phone was pinging like hail on a tin roof. Every Icelandic person standing near me in the coffee shop stood still as well, glued to their phones, absorbing and sharing the shocking news coming from the south.

“Are you OK?” I echoed as I began texting my many glacier industry friends.

“Yes,” said one. “It’s on the west side where we are not operating.”

“Yes,” said another. “I don’t work ice caves in the summer.”

My Reykjavik friend messaged: “All rescue available on the way.”

I exchanged more messages, sharing the names of those I knew who were safe: Einar, Haukur, Step, Helgi, Laufey, Óskar, Helga.

“The cave in Breiðamerkurjökull caved in. With people in it.”

“Helicopter pilot says 25 people on the tour.”

“The ice wall fell over four people.”

“I have heard one dead and some injured and some still stuck inside the moulin/ice cave.”

“Fuck.”

For the uninitiated, ice caves are almost impossible to believe until you’re standing in one. They are the bluest of blues, Neptune’s seeping heart. Imagine a frozen sea holding all possible luminous blue that upon closer inspection vanishes to clear. Over the years, I’ve seen people weep in awe. Laugh joyously. Become mute, contemplative. Verbose in wonder. All happy to be in an ice cave.

I taught my toddler what a glacier was by reading aloud from the children’s book, Angela’s Glacier, and by the time he could talk, he could recite that a glacier is a moving body of land ice and snow that persists year after year.

Ice caves are part of that “moving body of land ice” definition — but they rarely persist beyond a year or two. The ice cave I have a picture of in my hallway and the Blue Flame ice cave that collapsed in 2024 have both melted away.

Glaciers constantly change — they move, grow, oscillate, melt. And in summer, when the bare hide of the glacier body is exposed to the atmosphere — think here, when the ice is not furred with protective winter snow — surface ice undergoes phase change, transforming to water vapor or meltwater. The meltwater flows with gravity until it hits an area of ice weakness — a fracture, bend, low point, or crack. And the water then works the weakness until it bores a tunnel into the ice.

Somewhat ominously, my go-to glacier text defines an ice cave as any large cavity formed by meltwater beneath a glacier, and takes pains to note in the four-sentence definition that “roof collapse is common.”

To some, entering a passageway into a glacier is absurd and dangerous. To others, it’s a fast lane to adventure and awe — or even wealth.

It can be overwhelming to attempt to make sense of the ice cave industry in Iceland — a gyre of local companies and bigger Reykjavik companies and third parties and the park service and response services and families and personal relationships and grudges and unpaid debts and alliances old and new. Together, they form a dense, volatile network plagued by conspiracy theories, videos of guides attacking one another, tales of infidelity and financial irregularities, burnout and high turnover and clashing views of safety and other priorities that make as little sense to an outsider as it does to locals.

Not exactly what is marketed to the millions of tourists who travel to Iceland annually to see the glaciers and ice caves.

How the industry is now is not how it started. When I first came to Iceland’s south coast in the early 2000s, tourism was just a small industry. In the summer, you could take a glacier walk with a bustling group of five or ride an empty tractor out to see puffins. Winter tourism didn’t really exist. The intrepid, well-heeled few could hire a respected local alpinist, Einar Rúnar Sigurðsson, to guide them up Hvannadalshnúkur, Iceland’s tallest peak. He also occasionally took photographers into winter glacier features like moulins or crevasses.

But in 2010, two things redrew the maps entirely. First, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted, halting European air travel for six days and beaming images of Iceland’s stunning countryside into billions of homes worldwide. Tourists saw accessible waterfalls, moss, black sand beaches, and blue-white glaciers. Then second, Instagram launched, and a whole new breed of iPhone-trotting tourists was born.

Tourism to Iceland exploded. By 2024, nearly 2.3 million visitors arrived into a country of nearly 400,000, outnumbering Icelanders 6 to 1. Imagine: Millions of people flying, ferrying, and cruising to the island, renting hotels and cars and guides, eating and drinking, buying hand-knitted wool sweaters, and contributing to a tourism economy valued in 2024 alone around $3 billion.

The glacier Breiðamerkurjökull emerged as the epicenter of glacier tourism, mainly due to the quasi-man-made lagoon at its terminus called Jökulsárlón — a proglacial lake chock-full of freshly calved and photogenic icebergs that crowd up on an exit to the sea that happens to be right along the main road.

“In 2024, we had 1 million people visit Jökulsárlón,” a park service ranger told me. “We had 1 million people, and 11 toilets.”

Fueled by this crush of visitors and seemingly boundless profit, the ice cave industry has completely changed.

Ice cave companies once operated during a conservative four- to five-month period from November to March, when the ice was mostly snow-covered, with very little water visible, and temperatures stayed cold consistently. Companies communicated with each other to ensure a positive tourist experience, and worked within the limits of their own capacities.

“Everybody just invests in a big jeep and makes a year’s labor out of four months,” one company owner told me back in 2016.

But in the past decade, that window has been pushed wider — and it’s math, rather than science, that explains why. In 2025, approximately 30 contract-holding ice cave companies were charging around $200 per person, operating groups sizes with 14 tourists per one guide, and offering two or three departures per day. Whether we’re talking Icelandic krona or U.S. dollars, the amounts stagger into the millions and billions quickly.

Given the money at stake, the expansion of the ice cave season beyond the original 120-day winter window was almost inevitable. What began as a tightly honored, safety-led access period stretched in those early years first by weeks, then by months, until now it is a year-round activity — repackaged and marketed in multiple forms, though the terrain itself has not changed: these are still ice caves, and what few rules governing them vary widely across Iceland.

Regardless of your perspective or position in the glacier knowledge ecosystem — if you’re an ice cave company, guide, ranger, tourist, researcher, anyone — the science remains the same: Ice caves are erosional and weak glacier features. They are never truly static nor stable any time of the year.

Icelandic glaciologist Magnús Tumi Guðmundsson and colleagues first reported the dangers of ice caves in 2017. He and his team then repeated their findings seven years later when it was clear the warning had gone unheeded. Both reports argue that tours to ice caves should never be conducted in the summer because the features’ primary function is to be major conduits for large and often unpredictable flows of water. The scientists list complex dangers, including propensity for sudden ice collapse, meltwater flooding, hidden shafts, avalanches, toxic gases, and more. If ice cave tourism must be allowed, the reports concede that such tours should happen only in the winter, when conditions are cold and marginally more stable with no visible flowing water, no thawing, no recent rain, no warm weather, etc. Such conditions, additionally, need to be assessed by an expert, or a guide who has achieved a certain level of training.

I asked my glaciological colleagues their thoughts, and one, a seasoned ice core scientist, laughed. She said ice caves any time of the year are “never a 100 percent safe feature to go into,” adding that you “couldn’t pay me enough to go in one in the summer.”

“They are playing with fire,” Guðmundsson told a local paper not long after the fatal collapse. “If you go climbing on your own or with friends, and you decide to explore a cave, then taking the risk is a personal decision. However, there is a fundamental difference between somebody doing something on their own, and selling a trip to people that you claim is safe, but is not.”

But this is not just about poor individual judgment — it is also about the system those judgments are made inside.

Even back in the beginning days of the industry, locals told me about the pressures they felt from mass tourism. What began as an effort to offer a unique glacier experience gradually shifted toward moving tens of thousands of paying customers into the ice each season.

Companies operated at capacity almost constantly — then were pushed beyond it. First, to take larger groups, then to add departures. One tour a day became two, then some days three. Growth was driven increasingly by non-local operators and third-party booking platforms, which pressured local companies to deliver on the reservations they sold. Larger companies based in Reykjavik — think here any name that pops up if you Google “ice caves in Iceland” — even started operating their own ice cave tours, cutting out local partners.

Soon, the pressure wasn’t just on group size or departures, but on the length of the ice-cave season itself. What had once been a tightly observed safety window was forced — first by weeks, then by months — into year-round access that began to feel not exceptional, but expected.

I asked a park ranger how Vatnajökull National Park defines an ice cave — a question with deep implications since the park oversees all glacier tourism within its boundaries. “We call an ice cave a cave that is under the ice,” he said. “That term, it can be stretched.”

This is the open secret floating around glacier country.

Today, not only are ice cave companies operating beyond the seasonal limitations professionals have recommended, but some are now going a step further: If they locate a small feature in a glacier — a hole, a cavity, a crevasse — they are “augmenting” it. Enhancing it.

Said another way: They are making ice caves.

Guides have long practiced safety work for visitors — cutting steps into ice, kicking down snow, or removing dangerous features. But several people from different companies described to me the use of generators, drills, blowtorches, chainsaws, and other heavy equipment on the glacier itself. One explained, “If a cave shows up in a day, you know there’s heavy equipment. … This community is tiny. Of course everybody knows who’s using power tools.”

“What we say is we do ‘access’ work to make it safe for clients,” a seasoned guide explained.

Glaciers are always changing, and even I have pushed, chopped, and cut ice to achieve access or make something safer while I’m working. But where do we draw the line? As a glacier scientist and a human being, I haven’t been able to get past the question of what a gas-powered blowtorch can do to the physical body of a glacier. Or a set of Makita drills, chainsaws, or heavy duty excavation equipment.

What do those cuts mean, to the glacier itself — to a glacier already imperiled, already melting at unnatural rates? Is this violence? Is this desensitization? Is it just business? Is the scale too small to matter?

Or is this about respect for what remains of our glacier systems, a refusal at all costs to add further harm?

And then, more questions: When does an ice cave stop being an ice cave, and become instead a construction project or a marketing campaign?

In Reykjavik, tourists can visit Perlan and explore a fully man-made ice cave, complete with blue lighting and piped-in frigid air. No one pretends it’s natural. But on a wild glacier, shouldn’t an ice cave be natural? When a glacier is drilled, blowtorched, and marketed inaccurately to meet demand, what exactly is being sold? And where is our responsibility alongside it?

The Blue Flame collapse happened on the western side of Breiðamerkurjökull, the side some locals describe as ceded entirely to mass tourism.

Many described the months leading up to the collapse as tense, largely attributed to the unrelenting numbers of summer tourists and pressure from outside companies. Every company had to decide: Would they risk operating ice cave tours in the hot summer?

Ice Pic Journeys, a company co-owned by Americans Mike Reid and Ryan Newburn, decided it was worth the risk. And on Sunday, August 25, 2024, two guides for Ice Pic, one of whom was new to glacier guiding and not yet certified, were assigned the afternoon trip with 25 tourists. They met the group at Jökulsárlón, drove them as close to the ice as possible, parked, and geared up with helmets and crampons.

Another tour company was already at the ice edge, heading to Blue Flame. In a statement to police, the guides noted two other companies had been to the cave in the days before, doing what was described as “maintenance work.”

The Ice Pic group headed toward Blue Flame, the tourists stepping clumsily in their crampons. It was, by all accounts, a typical and pleasant late summer day. Balmy. One of the guides went ahead of the group to chop out better steps into the ice cave. Then, the entire group descended, walking past a large overhanging wall of ice.

When I look at pictures later of the scene, what strikes me is the color of the ice. It’s dirty, covered in seasonal sediments — dark black particulates that hold heat and exacerbate surface melt. The ice itself is mostly white, as expected for summer surface glacier ice actively ablating. It’s full of air, like styrofoam — not dense like typical glacier ice, which is so compressed it squeezes out air and scatters short wavelengths of light, which reads as blue to you and me. This ice at Blue Flame had barely any hints of blue.

The distinction matters. Ice like this is melting, from its surface and from inside. It is not stable.

But the Ice Pic tourists didn’t know this, and, likely, neither did the guides. So they spread out. One tourist, an American from Austin, Texas, on a trip with his 10-year-old daughter, walked around and back up onto the surface of the glacier, where he had a view down into the ice cave. Two other Americans, a couple on their one-year wedding anniversary, posed for pictures directly in front of the ice wall. The two Ice Pic guides met with a guide from another company and discussed hazards and future cave maintenance. Then the other guide started to leave with his group.

That’s when, according to statements given to the police, a boom rang out. A crack.

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of hours on, in, and sleeping atop, glaciers. They are constantly sounding off from shifts happening somewhere within, from a collapse, ice flow redirection, the shuffling of crystals and conduits and crevasses. The sounds tend to have the same effect on me — loud cracks stop me instantly in my crampons, accelerate my pulse, make the spiders guarding my brain stand at exquisite, painful alert.

At the boom, the new Ice Pic guide turned and saw the ice wall fall as a single piece — straight toward the American couple. It shattered on impact, like a car windshield.

The next moments were blurry. The guide thought he saw two more helmets disappear under the ice. But he wasn’t sure. Then, as the icedust cleared, he saw the young woman prone on the ice, gasping, still alive. Her first words are recorded in the police statement: “I’m pregnant. I can’t breathe.”

Then, “Where is my husband?”

The two guides pulled pieces of glacier off her to get her free. Then, they tried to excavate her husband, Jeffrey Ayco, but could not. The guide from the other company rushed back, and then so did a few tourists. There was, apparently, a medical doctor in the group. Everyone tried to help.

With their ice axes and bare hands, they hacked at the ice, piece by piece, and gradually cut Ayco free. His body was crushed, but they began CPR anyway, because, as the guides later told the police, they had to do something. And they could not see if there was anyone else under the ice.

Just before 3 p.m., the Icelandic emergency services received a 112 call and issued a Search and Rescue alert for a mass casualty incident. The initial report stated the incident involved a group of 25 tourists and two guides, ice fall, and the possibility of people trapped underneath. All across Iceland, phones lit up, text notifications flooded in. GPS coordinates and radio channels were given. And then hundreds of search and rescue volunteers rushed to Breiðamerkurjökull and the summer ice cave and the tragedy that awaited.

One rescuer said later, “My first thought … this is gonna be very bitter, but my first thought was, ‘So it finally happened.’”

The volunteers — highly skilled, trained to respond to this type of incident — convened at the ice cave alongside regional police, park service rangers, Coast Guard, and many others. The injured pregnant woman was loaded into a Coast Guard helicopter and flown to Reykjavik. Her husband was declared dead.

But what about the other people under the ice? Almost immediately, it became clear that no one knew how many additional people were missing. The two Ice Pic guides did not have a firm count of the actual number of people on their tour. They said there had been two no-shows, but then, perhaps two walk-ons had jumped in? Was it really 25? Were the two helmets he saw solo travelers, out on the ice on their own? The freshman Ice Pic guide was likely in shock, questioning what he’d seen, uncertain if there were more injured under the ice.

Search and rescue volunteers got to immediate work. In the tight quarters of the collapsed ice cave, volunteers used the least disruptive hand tools to remove, piece by piece, cubic tons of broken glacier ice. If there were people underneath, they did not want to risk further injury.

“If there’s an uncertainty, you just … you don’t stop,” explained a rescuer who had been on the scene. “You assume you have to keep going.”

Twenty-four hours went by. Bus drivers and school teachers and bartenders and sheep farmers and tour guides and scientists and park rangers and mothers moved ice by hand. Secondary trauma built as muscles strained and tempers frayed and some questioned if they were digging for ghosts. They chipped apart a glacier, block by block, carrying each piece out and away by hand, and again, again, again. This time, not to create an ice cave and make money, but now, possibly, to save a life.

After the initial 24-hour search, heavy equipment was brought in to remove the remaining ice.

Nothing was there, under the glacier, except more melt.

The search was over. Everyone went home.

Almost.

“My brother, his life was just getting started,” Ruben Ayco, Jeffrey’s brother, told me. “He was just there, checking out ice glaciers. He was a very adventurous person.”

“Several steps could have been taken for this to be avoided,” he continued. “It seems like greed and profit overcame that.”

In the days that followed, the rescue association released a statement, thanking all the responders involved and expressing deep condolences to the relatives of the deceased.

The Chief Superintendent for the South Iceland Police gave a statement to the media. “Ice cave tours happen almost the whole year,” he said. “These are experienced and powerful mountain guides who run these trips. It’s always possible to be unlucky. I trust these people to assess the situation — when it’s safe or not safe to go … This is a living land, so anything can happen.”

I understand how it happens. We agree on a fact. New variables emerge. More data arrives. What we thought we knew shifts. That, initially, is what attracted me to science, the idea that knowledge moves forward.

But here, the shift didn’t move toward better understanding propped up by the best science. It reversed. Ice caves, especially summer ice caves, once clearly labeled dangerous, were slowly reclassified as safe, likely at the same time companies fully grasped how lucrative they could be.

After the collapse, the Icelandic Tourism Board resisted calls to regulate the industry, insisting safety was the tour operator’s responsibility. For the glaciers inside its boundaries, Vatnajökull National Park did introduce new safety and permitting processes for companies. Operators now need to send the chief ranger pictures and make official requests to do maintenance or hazard mitigation. “And then I send back, yes, you can do this, or no, you cannot do this, but, you can only use the power tools after hours,” the former park service chief ranger told me. “I put restrictions on, and I just have to trust that they follow them.”

For the glaciers outside the park, it remains unregulated.

Locals on the south coast are trying. They convened Fagráð, a committee composed of highly experienced people from different sectors of the glacier industry, including commercial operators, tourism associations, and guiding organizations, alongside associated members from the park service, the local municipality, and other observer positions. Fagráð’s purpose is to provide guidance, oversight on safety matters, and education for all issues of glacier and ice cave tourism on the south coast. In one of its first acts, Fagráð sponsored the launch of a portal set up for ice cave operators, called GLACIS. It’s a user-friendly database, intended for trained professionals, that lists every accessible ice cave in the south coast region. When I clicked around a demo of GLACIS, I could easily upload general cave information, images, directions for access, tourist capacity, time-stamped ratings and safety assessments, and other critical information. Anything guides, rangers, and operators upload is anonymous, but, important to the success of the portal, users with specific credentials such as Lead Guide or Park Ranger may assign a status to an ice cave: “go,” “caution,” “warning,” or “no go.”

The park has decided in concert with the ice cave industry that all companies must comply with the GLACIS status of an ice cave. Companies found accessing “no go” caves in the national park risk having their contracts revoked.

In essence, GLACIS is a community of honesty for the ice caves, a Wikipedia for shared glacier knowledge, where operators have access to community-generated and expert-vetted facts. The administrator of GLACIS told me, “We are still trying to figure it out, because as one would expect it’s never perfect and people like to complain. But the end goal is very simple: facilitate better communication and situational awareness for everybody involved.”

These are real steps toward a safer ice cave industry. Important ones.

But what I keep getting stuck on is the simple fact that summer ice caves aren’t OK. Ice caves aren’t OK. Breiðamerkurjökull is not OK. None of the glaciers are. Just because millions of people want to spend millions of dollars to see the ice before it’s gone doesn’t mean it should happen, or that it’s safe. The financial incentives that rewards pretending otherwise are not OK.

From a glaciological standpoint, an ice cave is not an attraction. It’s a hydrological conduit carved by melt, shaped by temperature, water, and gravity. It is destined to fail. And as glaciers increasingly destabilize and melt accelerates, these features will grow larger and more numerous, even as they become increasingly unstable and dangerous. Even winter, once a margin of safety, is no longer reliably cold.

Where Blue Flame stood in 2024 is now loose gravel. The part of the glacier body that held it is now gone — fully melted some 18 months later and a whole lot of strife since.

Jeffrey Ayco’s daughter is one now. She’s never met her father. But she, Ruben tells me, “looks just like him.”

We all have a role in what happens next.

For decisionmakers, that means following the science that says ice caves should only be accessed in real winter — while real winter still exists in Iceland — and closing the regulatory loopholes that allow unsafe practices to persist. It means reducing the outsize influence of third-party booking platforms and shifting power back toward local expertise, safety, and accountability.

For tourists, it means accepting limitations on consuming this unique and precious landscape, and understanding that “no go” is always a possibility, and often a form of care.

For companies, guides, and researchers, it means using knowledge systems like GLACIS in good faith and telling the truth, even when the truth costs money and access.

And the next time my son — who is the mirror image of me — wobbles to a stop at that blue-blue image and asks if the glacier is OK, I’ll answer differently.

I’ll say no.