Discover Iceland: Emmely’s Northern Lights Adventure

It usually starts as a faint green veil low on the horizon — easy to dismiss as cloud cover if you’re not paying attention. Then it shifts, spreads, and suddenly the whole sky is moving. That first proper burst still stops me cold.
Because Iceland sits so close to the Arctic Circle, it’s one of the best places on earth to see the Northern Lights, or the Aurora Borealis as scientists call them. The name is Latin and Greek in origin: “Aurora” is the Roman goddess of dawn, a nod to the colours you sometimes see at sunrise, while “Borealis” comes from Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind. Put together, Aurora Borealis means something close to “Dawn of the North” or simply “Northern Lights.”They show up most reliably in winter, when the nights are long and genuinely dark. Places with little light pollution give you the clearest view — Þingvellir National Park, the area around the Hekla volcano, and the Westfjords are all well regarded for this. Cold nights tend to mean clearer skies, which is one of the few upsides of standing outside in sub-zero temperatures waiting for lights to appear.

The Aurora takes different shapes — sweeping arcs, rippling ribbons, slow pulsing curtains of light. No two displays are the same, and that unpredictability is a big part of what makes them so compelling.

What’s actually happening is a collision between charged particles carried by solar winds and gases in Earth’s atmosphere. When those particles slam into oxygen and nitrogen, they release energy as light — the light we’re watching from a frozen field at midnight.

The colours depend on which gases are involved and at what altitude. Oxygen around 100 km up produces the green you see most often. Higher up, oxygen gives off rarer red tones. Nitrogen is responsible for the blue and violet shades, which tend to be fainter and harder to spot. Green dominates most displays because that altitude range is where oxygen is most concentrated.For Icelanders, the Aurora has always meant more than physics. Old folklore tied these lights to the gods, to omens, to the spirits of the dead crossing the sky. Some stories held that they brought luck and protection — particularly for pregnant women. That layer of meaning hasn’t entirely disappeared. Even visitors who arrive knowing the science often walk away feeling they’ve witnessed something that resists a tidy explanation.

Scientists study the Aurora to better understand solar winds and Earth’s magnetic field — research that has real consequences for satellite systems and power infrastructure when geomagnetic storms hit. But scientific context doesn’t dull the experience. If anything, knowing what’s producing those colours makes it stranger and more impressive.

If you’re planning to watch for the Northern Lights in Iceland, dress for the cold — properly, not optimistically. Layers matter. Bring something hot to drink; tea or cocoa makes a long vigil significantly more bearable. With a bit of patience and preparation, there’s a good chance the sky will put on something worth remembering.

I hope you get as lucky as I have.