Snorkelling and Diving the Silfra Fissure

Silfra is a water-filled fissure inside Þingvellir National Park, and one of the very few places on Earth where you can snorkel or dive directly between two tectonic plates — the North American and Eurasian.

The water is the whole point

Silfra’s water is glacial meltwater that has spent decades filtering through porous lava rock, arriving essentially free of sediment. The result is visibility that can exceed 100 metres — among the clearest water anywhere in the world — in strikingly blue tones.

It’s cold — and that’s handled for you

The water sits at a few degrees above freezing year-round. Tours provide full dry suits, thermal undersuits, gloves and hoods, which keep you comfortable even though your face is the only part of you actually in contact with the water.

Snorkelling vs. diving

Snorkelling requires no certification or prior experience and suits most visitors comfortable in water. Diving Silfra requires a drysuit-diving certification (or a specific check dive beforehand) — a genuinely more involved undertaking, but one of the more memorable dive sites many divers ever log.

You’re not just snorkelling a pretty lake — you’re floating in the gap between two continents, in water so clear it barely looks real.