Snæfellsjökull

A glacier-capped stratovolcano 700,000 years old at the western end of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, sometimes visible from Reykjavík across Faxa Bay, 120 kilometres away. Jules Verne put the entrance to his Journey to the Center of the Earth on this mountain in 1864 and the association has never let go. An arctic mirage on 17 July 1939 let Captain Robert Bartlett sight it from between 536 and 560 kilometres off. Its ice is going: 16 square kilometres in 1946, 14 in 1999, 10 or 11 by 2008, and in August 2012 the summit was ice-free for the first time on record.