One foreign tourist dead and two missing as ice cave collapses in Iceland

One severely injured tourist airlifted to National University Hospital

At least one person has died and two others are missing after an ice cave collapsed during a visit by tourists in southern Iceland on Sunday.

Emergency responders received a call at around 3pm that an ice canyon gave way in the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier when a group of 25 tourists were exploring the cave.

“Four people got stuck under the ice, two people have already been rescued from the ice and are seriously injured,” Sudurland police said in a social media post on Sunday.

Police later said one of the rescued tourists had died from their injuries at the scene of the accident. The other was taken by helicopter to Landspitalinn, the National University Hospital in the capital and is reportedly in a stable condition.

“The search is still on for the two people trapped in the ice cave,” said the police statement.

Others in the group escaped uninjured.

Local media reported that it was not immediately clear which country the tourists were from or what company operated the ice cave excursion.

A large number of rescuers were dispatched to the scene of incident, who worked throughout the afternoon and into the evening searching for the two missing people.

The operation was paused after dark due to the dangerous conditions but will resume in the morning, police said.

The Breiðamerkurjökull glacier is part of Vatnajökull National Park, one of Europe’s largest, spread across nearly 5,460sq miles. Local news site Visir said the group was on an organised ice cave tour and were accompanied by a guide but most people were outside the cave when it collapsed. The ice cave is a popular destination for tourists.

The collapse was likely not related to a volcanic eruption in southwest Iceland on Friday, around 185 miles away from the glacier.

Handout picture released on 23 August by police in Iceland shows lava and smoke erupting from a volcano near Grindavik on the Reykjanes peninsula (Iceland Police)

Icelandic public broadcaster RUV reported that efforts to transport equipment and personnel up to the glacier had proven difficult due to the rugged terrain and cutting through the ice was mostly done by hand with chainsaws. A team of 150 people are involved in the search and rescue effort.

“Although we think we know the location of the two missing, it is hard to say what amount of ice is between them and the rescuers,”Jón Þór Víglundsson, a spokesperson for ICE-SAR, a volunteer search-and-rescue association was quoted as saying by the New York Times. “It is a difficult situation.”

Additional reporting by agencies