Who Lives There?

That's what Grace asked in astonishment after looking at my pictures of the Icelandic landscape.  So here's some answers:

The population consists of about 300,000 folks of mostly Nordic heritage...

Who settled Iceland in the ninth century, when Eric the Red was kicked out of Norway.

Some are imposters.

I found a wonderful sense of humor....

Harvest at the marshmellow farm.

 And a love of color.

They have few natural resources and settled the country with what they had at hand.

Old turf home.

Church from driftwood and turf.

Stirrups.

Even today, they figure out ways to use what is around them.

"Leather" tanned from wolfish skins

Salmon skin.

The only crop of significance is hay and what isn't a hay field is filled with sheep. As are the roads.

Icelanders also raise cattle, which apparently are ocean-going...

...and the famous, fabulous Icelandic pony.

To maintain the integrity of the breed, no other horses are allowed into the country and if one leaves for an international horse show or a week at Club Med, it is not allowed to return.

Speaking of leaving, drastic numbers of young people are abandoning the rural areas of the country (which is just about everything except Reykavik) and heading into the cities. Deserted farmhouses dot the outer fjords.(We can find a ghosttown anywhere in the world, just dare us.)

The wildlife is primarily birds. I could have spent a lifetime watching them as they returned from their day trips fishing to their clifftop nests.

See the white chalk line in the grass? That is the official protection against falling 1500 feet off the cliff.

And finally, there was this. The ultimate indicator of a civilized culture.

And that, she said, is what I did over my summer vacation.

The End.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Earth Science for Dummies: Lesson 2

I grew up in Michigan, so I thought I knew something about ice. But nothing prepared me for turning the corner and seeing a glacier.

The glaciers are the Rocky Mountains of Ice. But unlike the Rockies, they are on the move.

As they melt, the ice pushes up against the earth,creating astounding formations.

The ice melt forms rivers, which carry the floes out to the sea.

 The enormity of seeing ice formed 2500 hundred years ago (Iceland's biggest Ice Age was 500 BC) end a journey...end an existence...before my eyes was strangely poignant.

As was cradling a piece in my hands. Look what water looks like without pollution.

The ice melt does more than create water (and massive floods, if it happens too fast). It creates the essence of the land and in largely untouched Iceland, you can see the story unfolding right beneath your feet.

 

Take a walk through an old riverbed and look closely at the rocks. They start like this.

 Centuries of seasonal thawing and freezing and thawing and freezing cut them like...well, like ice. With no one around to disturb them, the fingerprints of the ice stay intact. 

Bigger rocks get cut smaller...

And smaller...

 

Until they become independent little stones...

Communities of pebbles...

 And then, finally, dust.

I felt overwhelmed by the majesty of this process. I know it goes on all around me in Pennsylvania, but our landscapes are so overrun with blacktop and bulldozers that I have never seen it with such clarity before.

You should go to Iceland if for no other reason than to see this. And you'd better hurry, before Thor smashes it all up.

Earth Science for Dummies: Lesson 1

Raise your hand if you paid attention in Earth Science.

I thought so. An internet full of earth science dummies.

Yeah, we know there's igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks. We sort of remember something called "continental drift," which explains why we're not all on the Euro. And we're pretty sure there's a molten core at the center of the earth, which we all know contains an underground ocean, a Lost City, and very mean dinosaurs.

But that's all I remember. After going to Iceland, I wish I had paid more attention to the Earth Science teacher and less attention to Marc Sakwa's big brown eyes. Because the most wondrous things I saw in a trip of wondrous things have to do with the earth. And how it reflects forces that escape our notice unless they really run amok.

Fire. Water and Ice. Wind.


Today's lesson will be on fire, which is the biggie when it comes to the earth. The molten core heats up the rocky plates beneath the earth's crust, causing them to pull apart.  The North American Plate and the Eurasian Plate, for example, are separating from each other at the rate of one inch a year.  Like most divorces, this one is full of volcanoes and earthquakes. All that explosive stuff is largely going on beneath the Atlantic Ocean...

...Except for the part that is bisecting Iceland.

Here is a new lava field in Nornahraun, formed by a volcanic eruption about 25 miles away. The eruption started mid 2014 and the lava already covers 33 square miles. (Intrepid Icelanders have already got the trailmarkers in place. I assume a shop selling wool sweaters will be there soon.)

The groundwater steams from ongoing heat.

This lava field sits on top of one that has already been eroded by a bizillion years of wind and ice.

And if you think this looks a bit lunar, you are not alone. NASA came here to train nine of the 12 Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon.

Not all the geothermal activity going on beneath the crust of Iceland erupts. Most just seethes...

 

...or bubbles away in mudpots.

These occur when gases from the magma intrusions mix with oxygen and turn into sulfuric acid, which then eats away the rock. And anything else it touches. Iceland apparently has a dearth of attorneys, because we were able to get as close to any of these toxic monsters as we wanted.

To you, our vacation probably looks like a whole lot of gray mixed with sulfur. But where there is geothermal activity, there is also a whole lot of this.

 

 

And when you're just miles outside of the Arctic Circle, what more could you want as a society than geothermal activity? It made it possible for the women of Reykjavik to do laundry in the last century...

(.And I love a country that recognizes today what it meant to haul laundry two miles in a wagon.)

Geothermally heated water is now piped long distances...

...so that almost every town has a heated swimming pool operating year-round. About 25% of country's energy is now from geothermal water, with the rest hydroelectric.  (But more about the Icelanders themselves in another installment.)

And that concludes Lesson 1. Unit test a week from Friday.