Accidentally Discovering Underwater Caves in Iceland - Jonina Olafsdottir

Very much like love, finding fissures that extend deep into the earth can happen when you aren’t looking for them. And that was very much the experience of Icelandic cave scuba diver and National Geographic explorer Jonina Olafsdottir. She was carrying biological samples from one fissure to her car when the country’s famous wind pulled the lid off of one of the containers and blew it into the mouth of another fissure that hadn’t yet been discovered. On a follow-up trip, Olafsdottir and a colleague discovered new animals previously unknown to science inside that same fissure. But Olafsdottir’s fissure research has just scratched the surface under the surface. Iceland has just over 300,000 people, but inhabits a fairly large landmass in the north Atlantic Ocean. There is still much about the country that hasn’t been studied by modern science.