Iceland - June 2006

Starting Out

The trip started out with our flight from Lebanon, NH to LaGuardia being cancelled and, in the end, we missed our flight to Iceland.

With a day to kill in New York, Larissa picked up a bunch of brochures to see what we might do. She found one for the Intrepid Sea, Air, Space Museum. This is a WWII era aircraft carrier moored in Manhattan with various aircraft on the deck and we decided that would be an interesting place to spend a few hours.

Thus, these first pictures from our Iceland trip, are all about aircraft on a carrier anchored in New York harbor.

This is an early version of the Blackbird, the A-12. It's a mean looking machine. The technology in that plane is over 40 years in the past and, as far as I know, it hasn't been surpassed or even approached. Are we still advancing? Have we passed the peak, at least in aviation? That would be sad.

They also have an example of a Concorde on a barge beside the carrier. Another example of a pinnacle in aviation that is, disturbingly, quite a long time in our past now.

On Our Way

Finally on the plane to Iceland, the sunset was interesting. I'm not exactly sure where we were when I took these pictures but we were far enough north on the flight that the sun never got very far below the horizon.

Arriving

There won't be so much narrative from here on, mostly just some context for the pictures. However, on arriving in Iceland, Smithsonian Journeys had arranged for a taxi to meet us and take us to where the rest of the group was. We stumbled off the plane at 6:00 in the morning, our driver was waiting to drive us to meet up with the rest of the group near Þingvellir who were just finishing breakfast.

We'd missed the first day which included visiting a geothermal powerplant that provides electricity and hot water to Reykjavík. That would have been fun to see.

Once on the road, our first stop was Gullfoss. If you want to see waterfalls, Iceland is a good destination.

Once of the things you might notice in these and the coming waterfall pictures is a distinct lack of guardrails. If you walk into the water and get flushed over the falls, well that was really stupid of you, wasn't it? It was refreshing.

The pictures that seem to show just an open plain were supposed to show the glacier in the distant mountains. I got better glacier pictures later but I think that glacier is Langjökull.

Then on to Geysir, from which we get the word geyser. The one we saw erupt is actually Strokkur, which erupts every 5 to 10 minutes, rather than Geysir.

I'm not actually sure which waterfall this is.

I took so many identical pictures just playing with the shutter speed. I'll edit that at some point too and just leave up one picture.

Thjodveldisbaer (Þjóðveldisbær) is a reconstructed Viking farmhouse, built near the discovered foundation of the original. The sod roof is, in part, because wood is so scarce in Iceland. The settlers collected driftwood that floated up the Gulf Stream or over from Siberia.

These two planes shuttled us over to Heimaey in the Westman Islands (Vestmannaeyjar). There we took a boat tour around the islands to see seabirds.

The islands have rather steep sides, as you can see, and the locals have installed ropes to help get onto the islands and to swing back and forth upon when gathering Puffin eggs.

The captain backed the boat into a cave, shut down, and played his saxophone. Nice acoustics; I wish I had an audio recorder with me.

In 1973, a fissure opened up on the island and lava headed for the town. We hiked up to have a look at the crater.

Here you can see how the lava ate into the town. Some 360 homes were destroyed (about 30%) and 400 damaged.

As well, you can see the colors that Icelanders like to paint their buildings. It seemed very cheery.

These four pictures make up a panorama of the town and harbor, showing the lava field. The people were afraid the lava would close off their harbor. They brought in several diesel powered pumps to spray water on the advancing lava to cool it and stop the flow. In the end they have a more protected harbor than before.

Pictures here from the Folk museum. The guy in the first picture has been collecting stuff for decades and shows it to the public. Very neat.

And early telephone equipment from Iceland, for John M.

You can walk behind Skógafoss to look for the treasure.

This is a lava flow from the Laki eruption of 1783-1784 that's grown over with moss. Besides being fascinating to look at, it's huge. The second two pictures were taken looking back from ???foss and tries to give a small idea of the size of the lava field. We spent much of two days driving through this lumpy, green landscape.

This sequence has my first picture of sheep. Maybe it's my only picture of sheep though there was certainly no lack of the animal.

Svartifoss (Black Falls) in Skaftafell National Park. The basalt columns are formed by the lava cooling very slowly. They form perpendicular to the cooling plane so the curve you see was caused by the stream of water now making the waterfall warping the cooling plane from being simply horizontal.

From Svartifoss we hiked over to get a better look at Skaftafellsjökull which is an arm off Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in Iceland.

From there we also had a view of Hvannadalshnúkur, the highest point on Iceland (2110m). Kristinn told us this is usually climbed as a day hike, taking 12 to 24 hours.

Birds! Lots of birds. We took a wagon ride out to this island (sort of island, across sand flats) which is a bird sanctuary. The large brown bird is a skua which can be somewhat aggressive. I got a couple good Puffin pictures and there are also guillimots down on the cliffs.

Oh yeah, and what appears to be a VOR transmitter. There were little airstrips all along the way. Often they were no more than a strip bulldozed out of the lava with the edges marked and a windsock. Kristinn said they were all open to private aircraft so it looks like small planes would be a wonderful way to get around the country. Bring a bike.

Next was Jökulsárlón, a glacial lagoon. We took a duckboat ride out to have a closer look at the ice.

Another panorama.

Fishing boats in Djúpivogur. The colors of the boats are like the colors they paint their homes.

Mývatn, or "that bug place" as Barbara called it.

If, in a pool of magma, bubbles of gas come up, they create a column of solidified rock which is hollow inside. If the magma pool them empties and becomes exposed, we get to see these.

Or, as Kristinn explained, they're trolls that stayed out in the sun and turned to stone.

Here we have a tephra cone. Tephra is the stuff that falls from the air from a volcanic eruption. If it hardens before hitting the ground, it just piles up as loose material.

So we climbed up the tephra cone. The first picture is looking back at the columns made by the lava pool. You can really see the extent of the magma pool that created the columns.

This sort of thing is the geological reason why the Mývatn area is interesting. Lots of sulphur in the air and water.

A geothermal vent sending hot water to a power plant.

There was this line of beautifully constructed cairns stretching out across the landscape. Unfortunately, my pictures taken from the moving bus didn't come out so great.

Iceland is on the mid-Atlantic rift, where the Eurasian and North American plates are spreading apart. During one active period, this spreading was happening so rapidly that they just stuck these pipes in the ground and came out with a ruler each day to measure the change.

Dettifoss, Europe's most powerful waterfall (by flow rate, I think). Again notice how you can just walk up to the edge of the water if you want.

Not far from Dettifoss is where the river used to run. It's an enormous escarpment that was carved out by a flood in a single day. It's also where we held a little ceremony involving fermented shark and schnapps. The shark wasn't as revolting as you might think. It's supposed to be good for an upset stomach.

Husavik, a fishing village in the north. I just liked the boats.

Goðafoss and the group photo.

Coming into Akureyri. Akureyri is a major town for the north of Iceland. From there we flew to Reykjavík of which I took no pictures.