Iceland - 6/23/2009

From Dr. Fenster's Blog:

Wednesday marked yet another memorable day on our Icelandic journey. We started the day with breakfast in Reykjavik and then, on a cloudy and sometimes rainy morning, we drove in our guide’s “super van” (more about the van in a later entry) about 30 minutes southeast to the newest geothermal energy power plant on Iceland – Orkuveita Reykjavíkur. Although we arrived with a couple of tour buses full of people, after a little while, the tourists left and we had the tour of a lifetime with our own personal tour guide. The facility had excellent exhibits including an earthquake room that simulates earthquakes of various magnitudes. The people who run power plants “worry” about earthquakes because they have pipes that transport hot water and power lines that deliver electricity to the people of Iceland and an earthquake could do substantial damage to those. To reduce the potential risk to these systems, the engineers developed a pipe system that “gives” with earthquakes. The pipes, about 1 meter above the ground, will run straight for a while, then take a 90 degree turn, then another, then another and then go straight for a while longer only to repeat the pattern. Fortunately, Iceland will never have earthquakes as big or that last as long as those in California, because Iceland sits on top of a different kind of tectonic plate boundary than California, so it will experience shallower earthquakes. Still, the earthquakes can reach 7.0 on the Richter scale – certainly large enough for everyone who has lived on the island to have felt one and to have caused substantial damage. I guess it’s the geologist in me, but I hope we get to feel one before we leave.

After seeing a video about and getting a short talk on how this company uses super hot steam from below the ground to generate electricity, our guide took us to platforms that overlook the actual rooms where all the action happens. I was struck by how quiet the facility was given the huge generators and turbines (4 of each) in the room. By the way, our tour guide, as do many people in Iceland, spoke perfect English –without an accent. You would think that English was his first language. When I asked him how he learned to speak English so well, he said what several others have said when I asked them that question – from watching TV!

After finishing up at the plant, we went to Þorlákshöfn to catch the ferry to Heimaey or what the locals call Vestmannaeyjar (Westmann Islands). The Westmann Islands got their name from the Irish slaves (Celtic/Irish men from lands to the west of Norway) who fled there after killing their master Hjörleifur of Hjöleifshöfði. Unfortunately, for the slaves, Hjörleifur’s brother-in-law, Ingólfur Arnarson found them on Heimaey and ended their lives.

The Vestmannaeyjar make up 13 islands but Heimaey is the only island that people live on. It is quite an amazing site to come into the harbor after traveling across the Atlantic for 2.5 hours on turquoise blue water. The islands only exist because of their location on top of a spreading or rift zone that has piled lava on the sea floor and over time built up to extend above sea level. In fact, there are many “islands” under the ocean that you cannot see from a boat or plane. The north end of the island has very steep and tall cliffs that are made of magma that came to the Earth’s surface beneath glaciers that were in this area about 10,000 years ago – and that’s what you see when approaching the island by ferry. But these rocks only make up the very north end of the island, and if that’s all the lava that came there, it would be a tall, but very small island. Fortunately for the people of Vestmannaeyjar, another volcano – one like you would see in Hawaii – erupted under the sea, built itself up, and created lava flows about 2,000 years ago that connected to the older 10,000-year-old rocks. The entire village of Vestmannaeyjar (which by the way is the largest village in Iceland with more than 5,000 inhabitants) is built on the lava from this volcano named Helgafell.

However, and unfortunately for the people of Vestmannaeyjar, another very violent volcano popped up out of the sea and erupted for 6 months – from January 23 to July 3 – in 1973. This is the event that John McPhee wrote about in his trilogy, “The Control of Nature.” His chapter is called “Cooling the Lava” because the Civil Defense Corps in Reykjavik came up with the idea to pump water on the lava to try to keep it from burying the entire village of Vestmannaeyjar. It was a very tough fight and the people finally won, but not before the village incurred a lot of destruction – including the burying of hundreds of homes under the lava and the piling of cinders up to the second floor of homes. In fact, some of the roofs collapsed under the weight of the cinders and so the rescue teams had crews that spent all of their time shoveling the cinders off the rooftops. The locals called this stuff “black rain.” After our guide, Eunoch, picked us up from the ferry, he took us to an outdoor exhibit before checking into our hostel where you can see the tops of some of the homes as crews dig them out from under the lava. The exhibit is known as “modern Pompeii.” Some of the people who owned these homes don’t like this idea.

We arrived to Vestmannaeyjar about 3:00 in the afternoon wrapped in a beautiful blue and puffy white clouded sky. We had planned to depart the island the next morning at 8:00 a.m., so we had to hit the floor running again – and boy did we! Good thing the sun never sets here in June.

So… as a first matter of business, we decided to climb the 220 meters to the top of the notorious Eldfell volcano. It took us about 20 minutes to walk the crater flank to the rim of the volcano for the most amazing view of the island and the mainland. There, right in front of us stood the massive subglacial cliffs, Helgfell, and of course the crater of Eldfell and its destructive lava beneath us. After some time on the top – and for a while staying warm up there by sitting, lying, or standing on the warm volcanic tuff that makes up the rim (it's still hot a few centimeters beneath the surface as steam continues to rise from hot lava beneath the volcano’s rim), we scurried down the volcano where Enoch picked us up in the big bus and off we went to the harbor to catch a private boat ride around the entire island. It was superb!

Turns out that a family-run business was taking care of us – the dad was the boat captain, the son was the bus driver, the mom made our dinner at the café. We had to wait a bit for the captain to take us because he was repairing their big tour bus as they were expecting 1,000 kids the next day for a big soccer tournament on the island. Once he got that repair taken care of, we shoved off about 6:00 in the afternoon for the ride of a lifetime! The ride beheld some magnificent scenery, including a huge elephant head on the side of a cliff made from columnar basalt, puffin and guillemot watching, but I have to say that the highlight happened when the boat captain pulled into a sea cave with our boat, turned off the engine, pulled out a saxophone and played a beautiful ballad.

Homemade pizza dinner and chocolate cake at the family café hit the spot. We also got to watch the movie “Volcano,” about the 1973 eruption, while eating dinner so that we could get a real feel for what it was like before, during and after the eruption. After dinner, the students walked to our hostel and I stayed around to talk with Unner (the mom) and Simmi (the dad). We talked for 2 hours. Turns out that Simmi and Unner last year rented a Harley Davidson motorcycle with 16 other Icelanders on Harleys and took 6 weeks to drive from Los Angeles to Orlando along Rt. 66. They were very proud of the Iceland magazine that featured their trip with two full pages of color pictures.

A trip to the café and a walk to the hostel ended this remarkable day. Just a few sunny hours later, we would awaken, hop on the ferry back to the mainland, and greet the 1,000 soccer kids waiting to take “our” ferry back to Vestmannaeyjar for a day of soccer.