Slush has been accumulating in river Jökulsá á Fjöllum in northeast Iceland, creating a block that caused the river to overflow a levee and to flood Kelduhverfi area.
The gap in the levee is 40 m wide, so Jökulsá is flooding the nearby flatland of Kelduhverfi. Slush is covering the area like a moving glacier, as RÚV reports.
The slush block steered the river over the 3m high levee and onto the Kelduhverfi highway. Soil reclamation guard Sveinn Thórarinsson told RÚV that he had never seen a flood like this before.
Thórarinsson said Jökulsá also overflowed in 1990, but because the levee was lower then, the flood is more powerful now. He worries that if the cold temperatures are going to last, the situation will worsen.
Jökulsá á Fjöllum flows from Vatnajökull glacier and into Dettifoss waterfall, which is reputed to be the most powerful waterfall in Europe.
Dettifoss has a flow of between 200 and 500 cubic meters of water per second. It is 100 m wide and drops 44 m down to the Jökulsárgjúfur canyon.
