A traditional Icelandic sod house built into a hillside faces the wide expanse of Vatnajökull glacier. Vatnajökull was the site of a volcanic eruption in November 1996 that melted billions of a gallons of glacial ice and triggered a cataclysmic flood that lasted two days. No one was injured in the flood, but it destroyed a bridge and littered a floodplain with huge blocks of ice, some weighing more than 1,000 tons (1,016 metric tons).

(Text adapted from and photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Iceland’s Trial by Fire,” May 1997, National Geographic magazine)