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The description is hardly enticing: a mountainous island touching the
Arctic Circle, small, barren and cold. Hardly surprising, then, that when
NASA was looking for somewhere to try out its lunar equipment, Iceland was
the place it plumped for, as the most Moon-like terrain that didn’t require
a Saturn 5 to get there.

The thing that made me go to Iceland in the first place had nothing
to do with science. In the 1960s, its national airline, Icelandic, was
known as the ‘hippy airline’ for its cheap transatlantic fares. This made
Iceland a regular stopover between America and Europe. The thing that made
me go back, however, was the country itself.

Iceland’s position at the tail end of the Gulf Stream gives it milder
winters than many more southerly locations, such as New York City, for one.
It even manages a certain amount of agriculture, in the form of pastures
to support the island’s considerable population of sheep.

It was neither the climate nor the agriculture that won my heart. I
was smitten during stroll down a shallow valley, flanked by cliffs, when
it dawned on me that I was smack in middle of the rift between the European
and Atlantic tectonic plates. I have been in other rift valleys – in Kenya,
for instance – but they are too vast and diffuse to make the same kind of
impact. Iceland’s is more intimate; it makes plate tectonics almost personal
– as though, with a few long poles and an automobile jack, I could contribute
my bit towards the spreading of the North Atlantic. That is the essence
of Iceland’s appeal for scientifically minded tourists: it is a living atlas
of geology.

The island lies on the northern extension of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,
that long underwater mountain range which itself is part of a world-girdling
formation that stretches from the North Atlantic into the Pacific. Only
isolated islands such as Saint Helena, Tristan da Cunha and Iceland itself
do the peaks of the ridge rise above the surface of the sea.

The task of making new sea bottom requires a supply of magma oozing
up from the Earth’s mantle, and that means that volcanoes are an essential
feature of this area. As it happens, I have had a personal fondness for
volcanoes for half a century – ever since I lived for six months on the
slopes of Mount Vesuvius – and Iceland is certainly the place to go for
volcanoes. It has some two hundred, though it is impossible to be precise
about how many are active. Old volcanoes are continually going dormant and
new ones are born. When a volcano emerges offshore, a whole new island may
appear, as happened in 1963.

The volcanoes’ effects are not always constructive. Not far away, on
the island of Heimaey, the eruption of Helgafell in the early spring of
1973 produced ground shocks and immense lava flows that nearly destroyed
the port of Vestmannaeyjar.

The island’s most celebrated volcanoes are Hekla and Laki. Hekla has
averaged one or two eruptions a century for the eleven hundred years the
island has been inhabited. The latest was in 1947, so another could be
due at any time. Laki’s only eruption in historic times was in 1783. But
this volcano is a giant with a hundred separate craters, and that one eruption
produced 15 cubic kilometres of lava, bringing about snow-melt floods that
destroyed most of Iceland’s farmland, killed off three-quarters of its livestock
and ultimately led to the death by starvation of almost ten thousand people
– a quarter of the island’s population at the time.

HISTORIC ERUPTION

Not all Hekla’s effects were purely local. As with the recent eruption
of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, the clouds of dust from Laki’s eruption
brought haze and fogs to much of Europe, and even to parts of Africa and
Asia, for months afterwards.

Such massive events are fortunately rare, but eruptions from Iceland’s
lesser volcanoes are more frequent, enough to account for about a third
of our planet’s surface lava flows over the past five centuries.

Although you can’t count on a volcano erupting every time you visit
the island, Iceland does have other volcanic phenomena that can be relied
upon to perform, notably the geysers.

In only a handful of other places on the Earth’s surface can you expect
to find these fountaining wonders – New Zealand, parts of the western US
and hardly anywhere else. Iceland’s take pride of place, and have been an
object of curiosity for Europeans long before anyone from the Old World
set foot in North America or New Zealand.

Two prerequisites for geysers are a plentiful supply of surface water
– from frequent rain or snowfall – trickling through the upper strata, and
a mass of hot rock not far below the surface. But these alone are not enough,
for the usual result of this combination is no more than a hot spring. The
crucial extra element is a small pond on the surface, extending down through
a narrow neck deep into the rock beneath.

As the water fills the deeper part of the hole, it begins to heat up.
Near the surface, the water remains relatively cool at first. The pressure
of the water column above it prevents the deepest water from boiling, and
it can reach temperatures of 150 °C or more. Slowly, heat diffuses
up into the surface layers of the pond, which begins to simmer gently. With
the slight release of pressure that occurs as a small amount of the upper
water steams away, the superheated deep water flashes explosively into its
vapour phase, hurling volumes of steam and boiling water fifty metres or
more into the air. Then the cavity refills, and the process begins again.

The whole class of hot water spouts gets its name from Iceland’s famous
Geysir, (the Icelandic word geysir means ‘rushing forth’) which is near
the little village of Haukadalur. Geysir’s great, intermittent spout of
boiling water was first recorded in the 13th century and it still erupts
from time to time – though no longer as spectacularly or as often as it
used to.

A good, unspoilt geyser may put on its show as regularly as clockwork,
which is how America’s Old Faithful in the Yellowstone National Park got
its name. But with tourists around, geysers don’t necessarily stay unspoilt
for long. Before Iceland’s tour guides were regulated they sometimes chanced
to arrive on the site with parties of visitors to see Geysir at times when
it was quiet. So as not to disappoint their customers, the less scrupulous
guides would administer the geyser’s equivalent of an enema, by throwing
refuse or oily liquids into the pond. This often produced a satisfactory
spouting on demand, but it interfered with the geyser’s internal workings,
which is why Geysir is not what it was. Fortunately, there are some other
good geysers still functioning nearby.

The hot aquifers have a practical use, too. Pumped up to the surface,
superheated water is allowed to flash into steam which turns turbines that
drive electricity generators.

Iceland’s geothermal power stations are worth a look, even though geothermal
energy is a far from trouble-free source of power. The geothermal generators
are built in areas where earthquakes are likely, and the steam is generally
contaminated with minerals leached from the rock, which damage tubes and
turbines. So they are not the principal power source for the island.

Less problematic is the use of geothermal energy for heating homes and
businesses. Hot springs and steam vents called solfataras are what gave
Reykjavik – Iceland’s capital, and its only city of any size – its name.
It has grown up on the site where the first known settler, Ingolfr Arnarson,
set up his homestead on arrival from Norway. He named it ‘bay of smokes’
– Reykjavik. Today much of the city is heated with water piped from the
many hot aquifers within easy range.

But for electricity generation, hydroelectric power is easier to handle
than geother-mal power, and Iceland has more than it can use. Hardly a tenth
of its water-power has been exploited. If anyone could come up with a way
of building suitable long-distance undersea transmission lines, the country
would be happy to sell pollution-free electricity to the British Isles,
and perhaps kill off the last of Britain’s coal mines.

Given the island’s name, it may come as a surprise to find that Iceland
is warmer than many more densely inhabited places, although it is never
very warm. But it does not have much in the way of forests, and there is
plenty of snow. Enough of it accumulates to leave one hectare in every seven
of the island’s surface covered by snow, and to produce 120 separate glaciers.
These are not puny. The Vatna glacier alone is bigger than all of continental
Europe’s glaciers combined. The meltwater of these glaciers feeds Iceland’s
many fast-flowing rivers and streams, which often appear milky-white from
their heavy burden of opaque rock fragments, pulverised in their rushing
courses.

No one would go to Reykjavik for a sun, sea and sand holiday, even at
the height of summer when maximum temperatures only reach about 14 °C.
But it is a pleasant city to visit, and provides plenty of creature comforts.

DOWNTOWN DELIGHTS

For instance, there are fresh vegetables grown in geothermally heated
hothouses, including a fair selection of tropical produce. One hothouse
operator seriously informed me that he had the largest banana plantation
in Europe – he possessed two trees, while no one else had more than one.
The boast may not have been entirely true, but it gives the idea. Most of
all, there is the wonderful variety of Icelandic seafood, prepared in a
wonderful variety of ways, and wonderfully fresh. And then, as you loll
in a steamy hot bath to ease the pains of exploration, you can reflect that
all that luxuriously hot water was produced without producing a single gram
of carbon dioxide or soot. You can swim in the open air if you like; many
of the great outdoor pools are also geothermally warmed, even though the
air is not.

Reykjavik also has several good museums. But, don’t look for local fossils
or for relics of prehistoric human activity – the island is too young to
have had any. Until Arnarson and the other early settlers arrived from Scandinavia
and Ireland, probably beginning around AD 874, Iceland had only one indigenous
mammal – the fox – and it has never had any reptiles.

Still, few would trouble to visit Iceland simply for the sake of its
main city. The real interest for science-minded tourists lies out in the
mountains and the plains. Explore them with pleasure; but wear your stout
shoes.

Frederik Pohl is a science fiction writer based in Illinois.