The Icelandic Seal Center — Selasetur Íslands — sits on the harbour in Hvammstangi, a five minute walk from the main road. It is a small museum and active research centre dedicated to the seal species that use Iceland’s coastline.

We had driven the Vatnsnes Peninsula the previous day — the loop road that circles the coast directly north of Hvammstangi — and the main seal observation area at Illugastaðir was closed, access restricted during the pupping season to protect the colony. Seals were visible on the rocks from a distance at several points along the eastern shore, but the close-access viewing the peninsula is known for was not available. The Seal Center the following morning gave us the context we had been missing on the drive.

Seven species of seal have been recorded in Icelandic waters in total. Two breed here and are present year-round. Four others visit regularly from Arctic breeding grounds. The seventh — the walrus — is now only an extremely rare visitor, and its absence from Iceland is a story that starts at the very beginning of human settlement on the island.

The resident species

The harbour seal — landselur — is the smaller of the two resident species, males averaging around 100kg and 1.7 metres, non-migratory, preferring shallow coastal fjords and tidal zones. The grey seal is considerably larger, males reaching 2.5 metres and 300kg, taking larger prey including cod, wolffish, and lumpsuckers. Both breed in Iceland and are seen year-round on the Vatnsnes Peninsula, which is one of their primary habitats in the country. The harbour seal gives birth in June, the grey seal between September and November, both producing single pups.

The Arctic visitors

The four regular visitors from the Arctic — harp, bearded, hooded, and ringed seals — arrive from their breeding grounds at the ice edge north and west of Iceland, typically in winter. The harp seal is the most numerous, historically harpooned and clubbed in large numbers in the northern fjords. The bearded seal is the largest of the four, identifiable by its dense distinctive whiskers. The hooded seal is notable for the inflatable nasal sac the male deploys during courtship. The ringed seal is the smallest and most ice-dependent of the group. None of these four breed in Iceland — they pass through.

Seals and the Norse

For the people who settled Iceland in the 9th century and spread across the North Atlantic, seals were not wildlife to observe but a resource to exploit. Seals provided the Norse with clothing, footwear, rope for rigging, and food. Both whale and seal meat were considered delicacies, and seal oil was used for lamps and as an alternative to butter. Seal blubber in particular became an especially important product — along with fat from other sea mammals it was used for frying foods and eaten in place of butter across the island. Seal skin was used for clothing, shoes, and bags. The hide of the larger species was strong enough to make the rope used to secure the sails of Norse ships — the same rope that held their vessels together crossing the North Atlantic.

The importance of seals only grew as Norse settlers pushed further north and west. Isotopic analysis of Norse skeletons from Greenland has shown that by the 14th century seals made up between 50 and 80 percent of the diet of the Greenlandic Norse — settlers who had arrived thinking of themselves as farmers and ended up depending on the sea for survival as the climate cooled and farming became increasingly difficult.

The walrus and its extinction

When the first Norse settlers arrived in Iceland around 870 AD they found walruses. Research by the Icelandic Museum of Natural History confirms that a distinct population of walruses lived in and around Iceland and became locally extinct around the year 1100 — one of the earliest documented examples of overexploitation of a marine species by humans. The cause was hunting for the ivory trade. Walrus tusks were a luxury commodity in high demand across Viking Age and Medieval Europe, documented in objects found as far away as the Middle East and India. The walrus was also valued for its hide — used for ship rope — and for its oil. Place names across the Icelandic coast still contain the word rosmhvalur — walrus — recording where they once existed. The animals themselves were gone within two centuries of human arrival. Occasional individual walruses are still spotted in the Westfjords today, drifting down from Greenland on ice floes, but there is no Icelandic population and there has not been for nearly a thousand years.

The current situation

The population numbers for the two resident species are the difficult part of the story today. The harbour seal population has declined 69% since systematic monitoring began in 1980, from 33,327 animals to around 10,319 in the most recent census. Harbour seals became protected in Iceland only in 2019. Before that, extensive culling took place on the grounds that seals competed with commercial fishermen for cod, damaged fishing gear, and spread the cod worm parasite. The museum does not sidestep this — the tension between conservation and an industry that has defined coastal communities for a thousand years is documented directly. Grey seal numbers have also dropped sharply since the 1990s, from around 13,000 to approximately 6,000 animals.