Iceland from the air: rivers, moss, ice and lava, fourteen years of the most beautiful photographs we have found.
Iceland is a young island still being built. It sits on the seam where two continental plates are pulling apart, so the ground is fresh in a way almost nowhere else is: lava fields only a few years old, glaciers grinding rock into flour, rivers that redraw themselves every spring. There are almost no trees to hide any of it, and that was not always so. When the first settlers arrived in the 870s, birch woodland covered somewhere between a quarter and a third of the island. They cut it for fuel, timber and grazing, and within a few centuries it was gone. What you get instead is the bare machinery of a landscape, out in the open, and it happens to be beautiful.
The waterfalls are here, but the view that keeps pulling people back is the one from above. A few hundred feet up, Iceland stops looking like scenery and starts looking like something painted. Rivers go gold and blue across black sand. Moss covers the old lava in a green that seems lit from underneath. Ice turns the color of a gas flame. And some years there is lava, moving, orange threads through a black crust. Photographers have been flying over it for as long as there have been cameras small enough to take up, and they keep finding new things.
This is a shelf of the best of it, fourteen stories from the site’s archive, chosen for the aerials, the textures, and the sense of a place where nothing has been touched. Every image links back to the full story and the photographer who made it.
42
Iceland stories on Moss & Fog since 2012
9
photographers who went up to get these
11%
of the island is covered by glacier
01 · Rivers Doing Watercolor
The rivers come first because they are the most Icelandic thing there is. Meltwater leaves the glaciers carrying rock flour and minerals, hits the flat outwash plains along the south coast, and splits into hundreds of channels that rearrange themselves every season. What the water carries decides the color: rust, yellow, a milky white, and a blue so clean it looks like a filter until you notice that every photographer who goes up finds the same blue.
Andre Ermolaev’s aerials, from 2012, were the first of these we ever ran, and they still hold up. Gabor Nagy called his series River Paintings, and the title is fair; framed on a wall, most people would take them for abstracts. Jan Erik Waider returned to the south coast in 2025 for Currents of Solitude, and in one frame a single horse and rider cross the black sand, tiny, which is the moment the scale of the place lands. Brynjar Ágústsson, who is Icelandic and photographs his own country, calls these channels the vascular system of Mother Earth. Look at his pictures and the phrase stops sounding grand.
02 · The Green and the Black
The forests the settlers cleared never came back, and today woodland covers only about two percent of Iceland, less than almost any country in Europe. That sounds like a loss until you see what grows instead. Moss, in unreasonable quantities, blankets the older lava fields so thickly the hills look upholstered. Twenty minutes down the road it is gone and everything is black: ash, basalt sand, lava that cooled last decade. A single road or river cuts through it like a pencil line, and the whole landscape reads as a drawing in two colors.
Nagy’s greener series is crater lakes and waterfalls, the Iceland of the calendars, but shot straight down so the lakes become eyes. Kevin Krautgartner called his series Iceland From Above and treats the ground like specimens under glass. Jesse Echevarria’s Islandia is the acid-green moss and the empty roads. And Benjamin Hardman, an Australian who moved to Iceland and stayed, works the black end of the spectrum: snowfields, a dark river branching like a winter tree, one volcano, and an arctic fox looking straight down the lens.
From the Shop
Things we would keep for ourselves
03 · Ice, From Both Sides
About eleven percent of Iceland is glacier, and Vatnajökull alone is larger than some European countries. From the air the ice is a field of blue blocks and crevasses, and Ben Simon Rehn flew a small red plane into the frame to give it scale. The plane looks like a toy. The blocks are the size of buildings.
From underneath, the same ice is another world. Each winter, meltwater carves caves beneath the glacier tongues, and each summer they collapse, so no cave lasts more than a season and no photograph can be repeated. Matěj Kříž goes in with a headlamp and comes out with blue light filtering through centuries of compressed snow. Of everything on this page, this is the hardest to believe is real!
04 · Fire, Up Close
Some of the landscape is new in the literal sense. Since 2021 the Reykjanes peninsula has been erupting roughly once a year, and the lava fields there are younger than most of the cars driving past them. Gabor Nagy walked out to Litli-Hrútur in 2023 while it was active and photographed the slow part rather than the fountains: orange threads pushing through a black crust, then hardening into rope. Jan Erik Waider’s Lava series gets closer still, until the rock looks like folded fabric with a lamp under it.
This is the same process that made everything else on this page. The rivers run over old lava. The moss grows on it. The glaciers sit on top of volcanoes. Watching it happen in real time is the closest thing to seeing the island being born.
05 · Standing On It
Two places at ground level, to finish, because from the air you can miss what it feels like to stand there. Fjaðrárgljúfur is a canyon in the south, about a mile long and three hundred feet deep, cut by a river at the end of the last ice age, with walls so thickly mossed they seem to hum. Almost nobody outside Iceland can pronounce it. The Westfjords are the opposite kind of place: the oldest corner of the island geologically, a gnarled hand of fjords pointing at Greenland, with roads that close for the winter and hardly anyone around. They are the least visited region in the country and, by most accounts, the wildest.
If You Go
Late September is the sweet spot: the moss is still green, the first snow is on the peaks, the summer crowds have thinned and the northern lights are back. The south coast has the rivers, the canyon and the glacier lagoons within a day’s drive of Reykjavík. Ice caves under Vatnajökull open with the cold, usually from November. Small planes fly from Skaftafell and Höfn on clear days, and an hour aloft is how several of the photographs above were made. The Westfjords take longer to reach and reward every hour of it, but go before the roads close.
This page will grow as the archive does. Iceland is not finished, and neither is this.
Keep Exploring
There are 42 Iceland stories on the site and this is the aerial, textural heart of them. The rest, from turf houses to the northern lights reflected in a crater lake, are in the Iceland category. For the wider world, keep going with The World’s Most Astonishing Natural Wonders, The Most Breathtaking Photography in the World and The Most Beautiful Places on Earth. For the practical side of getting there, our travel sibling The Window Seat is the better bet.
The guides Extraordinary Buildings · Natural Wonders · Animal Defense Mechanisms · Breathtaking Photography · Beautiful Places on Earth · Paintings and Illustrations · Retrofuturism · All guides
All images © the photographers, as credited on each linked story. Fjaðrárgljúfur photographs via Unsplash.
Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog
