As mentioned on 1 and 2 January, Iceland’s brief history of a landform is steeped in violence—crashing continental plates and lava-spewing hotspots. It figures that the island is not all that stable inside or out.
Geysir lost its eponymous geyser when vents and faults shifted deep underground. The area is now a field of steam vents. For the same reason—shifting geology—new hot springs pop up. A tour guide told of one such nascent hot spring erupting in a couple of houses. In the houses. And a town had to relocate its cemetery so that the corpses would stay buried.
An even greater incidence of movement, though, is within glaciers. Technically speaking, water is a mineral and ice is a rock. Glaciers are therefore rocks. That move. Here in the US, our glaciers are valley glaciers, forming high in valleys and grinding their way downhill to lower elevations where warmer air melts their noses. As they move over bumps and around corners, they form crevasses, deep, deep, narrow cracks. Two or three feet a year is breakneck speed. Most move much more slowly, and the center of the glacier moves faster relative to the sides.
Cap glaciers sit like a yarmulke on high, rounded hills
Iceland’s glaciers do not plow down valleys; they crown hills. And their glaciers, like ours, are constantly moving. Like ours they form potentially lethal crevasses and are normally snow-covered. Unlike ours they do not have streaks called moraines paralleling the sides. Also, since they do not grind down, their meltwater is clear, not milky with glacial flour.
Wanting an attraction of some sort, farmers four or eight at a time used picks and wheelbarrows to tunnel into a vast cap glacier. It took them fourteen months. Today you bus up a gravel moraine to the edge of the glacier and climb into a mobile missile launcher; I kid you not; to travel over the glacier to the tunnel entrance. The tour guide takes you down into the tunnel. My footing was really dicey until we paused in a room and put on crampons. It’s a great tour, and you even pause at the bottom of a crevasse—and look up.
The missile launchers, fortunately, are repurposed from their original cold war duties. They are huge semi rigs. Each tire is about four feet high, a foot wide, studded, and equipped with a valve system that pumps it up to hard on solid ground and on ice lets air out so it has a better purchase. I asked the guide, “How much does one tire cost?” “About $8000 American.” There are six wheels to a vehicle.
People with picks and shovels have to constantly re-shape the tunnels because the ice is in motion and the tunnels are stretched, squashed, and bent. Even so, the workers can’t keep up with the changes, and probably, the tour through the tunnels will be gone in fifteen years or so.
Sic transit gloria mundi.