Photo credit: Cassie Boca
Leaving Iceland was an adventure in itself. First, my phone case slipped off my belt in the airport and I lost my phone. How would I make contact with Alyce, who was supposed to pick me up at SeaTac? I was directed to a customer service desk. The fellow waved a phone in the air. “Is this it?” Relief! “Yes!” “Can you prove it’s yours? “With two taps.” It opened, and I no longer had to worry about reaching Alyce.
There seemed to be a hot security alert, and Iceland is not accustomed to hot security alerts. We were inefficiently crowded into rooms, carefully hand searched, stuffed into other rooms, and searched again. Like the second crew didn’t trust the first to do it right. Then we were herded onto buses SRO that took us out to our plane, loading on the tarmac. If you simply could not negotiate those stairs like presidents use, a fork lift would raise you to a little door in the pilot’s cabin.
Finally, the plane took off. Reykjavik is on the island’s west coast, so I didn’t see much of the country as we left. We passed a long, flat, black peninsula with a conical volcano parked smack dab in the middle of it. The cone was snow-capped.
In the Pacific Northwest, the Columbia basalt flows cover nearly 200,000 square kilometers. The even larger Deccan traps in India, similar basalt flows, are dwarfed by the Siberian traps, much more extensive flows. All this basalt buried the land. In Iceland, however, basalt is the land. When basalt erupts it pours out across other basalt and across the thinnest of sedimentary crust, a few inches of new soil. And it is from that few inches that Icelanders raise their animals and crops.
Forests are good at building new soil. Tree roots break up rock and the detritus of trees—needles, leaves, things that break off, the trunks themselves—forms organic mulch to provide nutrients. Iceland was extensively forested when the Vikings arrived. It didn’t take them long to deforest it. As I rode buses abroad across the land, I noted that the trees in any area seem to be similar in age. So I asked. Yes, The country is planting groves lickety-split, but they still have a long way to go. Iceland is pledged to plant up to three million new trees a year, not just to restore forests but also to combat climate change. Trees are good at sequestering carbon, too.
And we fly on.
Photo credit: Jason Krieger
Off the east coast of Greenland hundreds of icebergs, alone and in clusters, studded the dark sea. On the west coast, very few. As in Antarctica, Greenland has nunataks, dark, jagged mountains buried to the waist in ice. They were spectacular.
We flew across the flat interior of northern Canada, most of it still white with snow. This country, the Canadian shield, is the pre-Cambrian North American craton exposed, the oldest land on earth.
“Not so fast!” barks Objector Man. “Central Australia is the oldest land on earth. And there are some parts of Africa….”
“Very well,” I counter. “Let us say ‘there is nowhere on earth that is older than this land over which I’m flying.’”
“Hmph.” Mumble mumble.
I found it intriguing. I have now traveled from one of the very newest landforms across one of the very oldest.
And now, as we hit the tarmac at SeaTac to end this epic journey, let me tell you about the other journey I made in the summer of 2019, a week in Belize.