Silfra Diving in Bláskógabyggð

You're standing at Silfra, a narrow, water-filled crack on the edge of Þingvallavatn Lake, right in the middle of Iceland's Þingvellir National Park. Take a good look at that gap in the rock. It's no ordinary crack. This is where two continents are pulling apart: the North American plate and the Eurasian plate. Every year they drift about two centimetres further from each other. That builds up tension, and roughly every ten years it's released in a major earthquake. That's how all the fissures in this valley were formed, and Silfra is one of the biggest and deepest.