Iceland 1
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Sat 27 Aug 2016 04:02
This is an iconic building, rightly famous already and quite fabulous inside. There is not much else of note in the city except the concrete cathedral:
Iceland is the land of fire and ice - fully 10% of the land area is under ice, while the country also has lots of active volcanos - 'recent' lava is defined scientifically as that extruded since the year 1500, and Iceland has a full third of all the 'recent' lava on the entire planet.
Iceland is actually part of the mid-Atlantic Ridge; in fact the only part on the surface, the rest being at the bottom of the Atlantic. The North American and Eurasian continental plates are being pushed apart at the rate of about 20mm per year, including here. So about half of Iceland is European, and half American. In SW Iceland you can see the ridge come ashore as a complicated rift feature. Here it is, with America to the right and Europe to the left:
Actually it's a bit more complicated than this, but it makes for good tourism (Iceland is modelling itself on New Zealand, with equal success - tourists this year will number about 2 million, compared with 60 000 in 1980). And here is another part of the rift inland at Alþingi, again with America on the right:
Did you notice the spelling? Icelandic, which is very close to 13th century Norse, uses not only all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet but also three other letters Ð (lower case ð), Þ (þ) and Æ (æ). Interestingly Ð and Þ are Anglo-Saxon in origin not Norse, showing the close historical ties between Iceland and the UK in medieval times.
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