When Icelandic Airlines serves you a gourmet dinner of roast beef, beautifully prepared potatoes and sides, and a dessert of cheesecake with berries, you are rather distracted from your primary job of pondering Iceland. There is, however no end of topics to consider further. Like age. This is one of the youngest land masses on the planet.
“Whoa!” says Objector Man (we’ll be hearing from Objector Man a lot). “It’s Hawai’i. The big island is only five million years old.”
“Yeah, but the oldest islands in the chain are around sixty-five million years old, and if you average it out, Hawai’i is maybe 35,000,000, give or take a decade or two.”
Eighteen million years ago, Iceland was little more than a twinkle in God’s eye. On our right, the Eurasian tectonic plate was bumping into the North American plate, the land mass to our left. They jostled. They tried to shoulder each other aside. You couldn’t see the roughhousing from above, for continental plates are often much more extensive than the continents riding upon them, with broad submarine skirts spreading out around them. Mantle basalt was surfacing, though, steaming, eventually to rise above sea level.
But that was recent history. A much older mantle plume, or hot spot, was also parked in the area. Together the two phenomena built a pile of basaltic rubble that emerged from the Atlantic to become Iceland. Incidentally, history is still happening. In 1963 volcanic activity built a new cone off the remote southeast of Iceland, an island they’ve aptly named Surtsey, Surtr’s Island. Surtr was a charred, blackened fire giant of unpleasant disposition who lurked in the shadows waiting eagerly for the moment when he could kill people and gods alike.
Today the two plates are pressed together in an uncertain, shaky truce. I rode in a bus down the gentle slope of a wide valley with a big lake, across a creek, and out the other side. I had just traveled from North America to Eurasia. Then we traveled back again in time for dinner at the hotel. Take their Great Circle tour and so you can do so as well.