AN ICELAND PRIMER

ICELAND REVISITED

 

Today I feel the urge to write again about Iceland — in part to smooth feathers that may have been ruffled by my earlier posted photo of a four-letter-word bearing Icelandic T-shirt. And in part to note some very upbeat features of life on what is essentially a huge composite pile of volcanic rocks, partly veneered with white whipped-cream-looking stuff called glaciers.

The surface of Iceland is an unusually fascinating landscape, and not only for geologists. Yes the country sits astride the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the boundary between two of Earth’s diverging tectonic plates. Yes this landmass began life as a small seafloor volcano, whose subsequent generations of magma-spewing piled up and grew from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean to its present elevations and shape above sea level. And yes it has experienced more than one eruption that impacted downwind human neighbors; in one instance (the 1783-1784 Laki eruption), the entire Northern Hemisphere suffered from Laki’s tantrum. For Iceland itself, Laki caused a famine, which resulted in the death of about a quarter of the human population. Stuff like this happens when you live on an active volcanic island.

But here follow examples of upbeat aspects with life on this fiery north Atlantic outpost. First, some statistics: Total land area is 39,769 square miles, about the size of Kentucky. Population is around 330,000, about the same as Honolulu, Hawaii, which also sits on a volcanic island in mid ocean. Nearly a third of Icelanders live in the capitol city of Reykjavik. The rest are distributed among a half dozen or so towns distributed across the country. About 10% of Iceland is covered with glaciers, one result of lying barely below the latitude of the Arctic Circle.

One might reasonably suppose that climate in this setting requires lots of fuel to heat buildings. WRONG! Well, okay you technocrats, RIGHT! But the fuel is not a hydrocarbon. It’s simply billions of harvestable calories stored in the ground as a result of its long and continuing volcanic history. Non-erupted magma, the composite accumulation of molten stuff that never quite gets to the surface on the path to an erupting volcano, has heated the ground so much that it’s quite expectable for a water well to encounter a warm, if not an above-boiling-temperature aquifer. For space heating, this liquid thermal resource is simply piped to buildings where it circulates through radiators. Reykjavik’s famous Perlan Restaurant sits atop huge adjacent tanks that distribute warm water to radiators throughout the city.

Decades of planet-wide burning of hydrocarbon fuels have resulted in climate warming now underway for Earth due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Iceland’s contribution to this increase is insignificant. Because of the warm-water space heating, combustible fuels are used only for vehicles, fishing boats and planes. Check!

All except an itsy bitsy amount of electricity for Iceland is generated at hydro and geothermal power plants. No combustible fuels are involved. I’ve been told that one small kerosene-powered generator exists somewhere in the country, but I can’t find any statistics on this orphan. Hydro was developed early on, as geothermal technology was improving. Today hydro produces 70% of Iceland’s electricity and geothermal the remaining 30%. These two resources provide 85% of the total energy consumption of the country. Fuel for the motor vehicles, boats and planes accounts for the remaining 15%.

Here’s an interesting side effect of the abundant clean and inexpensive electricity available in Iceland. Aluminum ore, called bauxite, requires prodigious amounts of electricity for its processing. As a sort of Ripley’s Believe it or Not factoid, bauxite mined in Australia is shipped to Iceland for refining. The savings in the cost of electricity, relative to refining near the ore deposits, makes this seemingly ridiculous situation commercially viable.

So that’s a thumbnail sketch for a land of natural marvels, inhabited by friendly people. My 1984 summer there was a nonpareil education in the variants of volcanic eruptions when magma encounters shallow groundwater, a lake or a glacier. Stand back, or the steam explosions and floods will get you!

For my adventuresome readers, geologists or not, I highly recommend a summer-season trip to Iceland. Tour volcanoes, waterfalls, geysers, and hot springs.

 

Svarta, where water cascades over cliffs of basalt lava flows.

 

Ride Icelandic ponies over backcountry terrain. Each rider gets two of these steeds, which are so small that they quickly tire from carrying an adult human. A rider switches back and forth as needed.

Visit Vatnajökull, said to be the largest glacier in all of Europe. Yes, Iceland is considered to be part of Europe. Discover what a Jökulhlaup is, but don’t get caught in one!

Swim in the huge public thermal pool in Reykjavik and splash about in its companion in-the-rough Blue Lagoon near the International Airport.

 

Blue Lagoon thermal pool. Steam bellows from a geothermal electrical plant in the background. Warm water, at the lower end of the generation cycle, is fed into the pool. Photo courtesy of Robert Fournier.

 

Play chess on the mega-board built on a large plaza in downtown Reykjavik. Dine at the elegant Perlan Restaurant atop the huge hot-water storage tanks for a bird’s eye view of the city.

Learn to appreciate this Icelandic saying, if you happen to get close enough to a fish processing operation to experience its distinctly stinky odor. “Ah. That’s the smell of money!” That money is needed more than ever since the collapse of the Icelandic economy in 2008. Your “foreign” currency will go an amazing distance there as you help the Icelandic economy recover.

A NEW SAGA IN THE HISTORY OF ICELAND

ICELAND’S ECONOMY FIGHTS BACK WITH TEE-SHIRTS

 Iceland sits astride the mid-Atlantic Ridge, a curvy north-south geological feature where two of Earth’s tectonic plates slide away from each other, while a potential gap between them is filled with newly erupted lava. A bulls-eye locality of extra-strong upwelling of magma from the underlying mantle has built up the new lava enough to rise above sea level, and thus create what has become Iceland. With continuing east-west spreading of the tectonic plates, the width of Iceland increases a few inches each year on average— a peaceful increase of a country’s land area without the horror of war!

 

3-D map of Atlantic seafloor. Iceland near the top of image.

 

A volcanologist friend of mine visited Iceland last month. He brought back a gift — the inspiration for writing this blog post. Visiting Iceland is a near-religious pilgrimage for any serious volcanologist. I was lucky enough to spend the summer of 1984 there, exploring this wonderland of volcanoes and their byproducts. Some recent events in Iceland, though, haven’t been so wonderful.

Now, you may recall that the most recent international banking crash, which began in the autumn of 2008, hit Iceland particularly hard. All principal banks went totally belly-up. In tatters, the Icelandic economy had to recover from an essentially zero starting point. Part of the recovery came by unilaterally cancelling debts owed to other nations, a move guaranteed to trigger a plummet in Iceland’s international popularity.

As this monetary tragedy was playing out, one of Iceland’s myriad volcanoes sprang to life. In the spring of 2010, Eyjafjallajökull (please don’t ask me to pronounce that ) spewed gritty ash into the atmosphere, and the sharp-edged fragments of this rocky debris drifted eastward and southward on prevailing winds. For days and weeks the ash cloud hovered from Iceland to Europe at elevations used by commercial aviation. Thousands and thousands of flights were cancelled to avoid almost certain loss of engine power from ingested ash.

From previous experience elsewhere, it was known that interactions between volcanic ash and jet aircraft can literally stop engines. Ash melts in the searing jet-fuel combustion stage and then resolidifies within the downstream cooler exhaust phase. Critical ports there can become sufficiently clogged with the solid rocky stuff to shut down an engine. A less serious effect of flight through an eruptive cloud occurs when ash sandblasts a cockpit windscreen so severely that the cockpit crew has no clear forward visibility.

Well, the combined effects of cancelling international debt and disrupting the daily flow of commercial aviation made Iceland the focus of two financial disasters for its European neighbors. Pocketbook pressure can strain friendships at all human-interaction levels.

Yet someone has kept a sense of humor in spite of these events. My friend brought me evidence of this resiliency in the form of a T-shirt with a message. He knows that a Tee is my equivalent of a business man’s formal long-sleeved button-down shirt. I apologize if any of my blog readers are offended by one particular four-letter word emblazoned on my gift. It would take a lot of T-shirt sales to pump Icelandic economy back to full health. But, hey, it’s a start.

A BIRTHDAY STORY

THE BEGINNING OF MY TIME

 We humans all have “our time” on planet Earth. One is born, lives for a difficult-to-predict period of time, and dies. My time began on May 10, 1941, and so all of my annual birthday celebrations recognitions (The older I get the less I feel like celebrating each event. That’s too exhausting!) have been on that calendar date. As I type this note, it is May 9, 2014.

Mother’s Day in the USA is the second Sunday of the month of May (a bit of unintended sing-song poetry there). Due to various vagaries of our Julian Calendar, the date for Mother’s Day varies from year to year. In 1941, Mother’s Day fell on May 11. When she was still among us, my Mother liked to tell me the story of the timing of my birth. Here’s her tale.

 I went into labor on May 10. There was no doctor or hospital in our home town. {That was Browns Valley, Minnesota.} I wasn’t interested in another home birthing, so your Dad took me to the nearest place with proper facilities. {That was Sisseton, South Dakota, about 12 miles west of our place.} At the Tekakawitha Hospital there, Doctor Bates oversaw your birth. Late that evening, your squirming told me you were ready to appear and enter the outside world. Doc Bates, thought I might want to be able to say that I gave birth on Mother’s Day, so he told me he could delay your appearance until then. I knew that Mother’s Day calendar date changes from year to year, so I told him I just wanted to get this over with. You were “officially” born at 11:30 P.M. on May 10, 1941, thirty minutes before Mother’s Day of that year.

 It’s a great story that I liked hearing Mother tell and retell. I think she was smart to not mess with the time when nature wanted me to appear. She’d already been through two birthing and would have three more after me.

Today, as an unabashed Mother’s copycat of sorts, I’m not waiting past one more midnight to recognize my birthday this year. I’m noting the passage of another year today, and will spend tomorrow trying to forget how old I am. My motto now is Carpe Diem, just in case the sun doesn’t rise for me the following diem.

Meanwhile, for your possible entertainment here’s a photo of me in the nude, taken not long after that 1941 pre-Mother’s Day birthing event.