At Nikon we're quite familiar with the work of explorer, naturalist and photojournalist James Balog. We've followed his documentary travels and supported many of his efforts on behalf of the environment, so we were not surprised to find out that once again he's been an eyewitness to natural history.

The email that came in late April from James's office told us that he'd been in Iceland and taken "some spectacular photographs of Eyjafjallajokull." We immediately followed a link to an array of dazzling images.

James got to Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced eye-uh/fat-luh/yook-it; literally, island mountain glacier) a little more than two weeks after it first erupted, but in plenty of time to photograph the volcano's ongoing activity. James is no stranger to Iceland: it's one of the worldwide locations where his time-lapse Nikon cameras continue to document receding glaciers and supply images to the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) website.

"There are two big volcanoes, right next to each other," James says, "and both are below glaciers." One is the Eyjafjallajokull glacier, the other is the larger Myrdalsjokull (Meer-das/yook-it), under which is the Katla volcano. "The glaciers sit on the volcanoes. Think of them as cake frosting thinly smeared on top of cupcakes—but the cupcakes are volcanoes." 

When Eyjafjallajokull erupted, fire, water, rock and ice spewed skyward. "When the lava comes up," James says, "it meets the ice as it breaks through the rock surface, but it's initially trapped by the ice. So it sits below, melting the ice until it breaks through the lake of water that's formed from the melting, and this buildup of pressure lifts the ice sheet and the water pours down a side canyon in the bedrock." 

It all made for incredible photographs that James took with his D3, which was almost always tripod-mounted. With him were four lenses—an AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED, AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED, AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED and AF-S NIKKOR 300mm f/2.8D IF-ED—and an AF-S Teleconverter TC-14E II.

"This was not a wilderness area," James says. "By the time I got there, it was estimated that 25,000 people had been up there. They said there were 1,000 vehicles up there on Easter Sunday...huge SUVs outfitted with gigantic tires. You can deflate the tires to three pounds of pressure so they function like treads on a bulldozer, and you can go grinding along over the glacier."

Despite the fact that James and other observers, scientists and tourists were in a declared safe zone, James says that "you had to be light on your feet and keep your eyes open," especially in one place where incandescent boulders were breaking loose from crusted-over lava and rolling down the lava wall. "The lava forms a 25-foot high wall and every so often there will be so much pressure behind the wall from the lava flow that all of a sudden a boulder will come rolling off and lay there glowing. It's 1800 degrees inside those boulders."

It's likely that Eyjafjallajokull and Katla will remain in the news for some time. "Icelanders have a written record of when the volcanoes have gone off for the past 1100 years," James says. "In that time Katla has erupted 23 times; the average recurrence interval is 48 years, with the vast majority of eruptions happening between 35 and 65 years apart. There's only one gap as long as 90 years. We're now at 92 years from the previous one, which was in 1918. Eyjafjallajokull has erupted only two times in the past 1100 years, but those two times were precursors, within a year, to Katla. And Katla is way bigger than Eyjafjallajokull."

Visit the Extreme Ice Survey website to see more of James Balog's work with glaciers around the world.