Volcanic mud pits, Iceland

The connection here at the airport is very fast, so here's one of my videos. This is a short clip that I took at the volcanic mud pit near Myvatn, Iceland. The name of this area is Námafjall. The whole area smelled sulfurous, and the ground is cracked all over, with some places venting sulfurous steam, and others actually fissures filled with boiling mud. It's an amazing place.

Farewell, England!

Well, I'm blogging this from the Heathrow airport. Today we disembarked the ship and took a quick tour to see Stonehenge (picture below), before heading to the airport. The tour was fast, but very nice - we passed through some lovely little towns full of quaint buildings, and saw some very nice countryside, as well as the imposing monument of Stonehenge itself.

This will be my last post while we're actually away, but if you're curious, keep checking this space, because in the next couple of days I'll upload a couple of videos that were too large to do on the ship's slow connection, including a video of bubbling mud pits, and another of an erupting geyser.

Belfast, the Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Coast

Yesterday the weather gods decided they'd given us enough good weather. We arrived in Belfast to a cold rain and wind. Our tour took us to the Giant's Causeway, about an hour's bus ride away. The causeway is a structure of thousands of basalt columns stretching out from the shore. There's a scientific explanation for its existence, but we prefer the Irish legend. As the story goes the giant Finn McCool lived in this place with his wife Oonagh and child Ossian. He heard of a giant named Bennandonner in Scotland that he decided he wanted to meet. Finn built the causeway from stone so that he could cross the sea to meet his rival without getting his feet wet and because there were no boats large enough for a giant. Without going into the whole story, Finn later destroyed the Scottish end of the causeway so that his rival couldn't come over to Ireland to attack him.

When we arrived at the place, the rain did stop for a few minutes and we were able to go down to the shore to see the columns and they were quite amazing. After a nice lunch, we rode through torrents of rain along the coast and had a view of the ruins of Dunluce Castle and the limestone and flint cliffs. The countryside looked beautiful despite the rain and we could certainly see why Ireland is called the Emerald Isle.

Today we're cruising down the Irish Sea and eventually around Land's End enroute to Southampton and the end of our journey. We've opted to take the trip to Stonehenge on our way to Heathrow so we do have one more place of interest to see.

Gullfoss - the Golden Waterfall

One of our stops on our tour from Reykjavik took us to the Golden Waterfall. It was impressive, both visually and audibly. The waterfall is fed by a glacier in the nearby mountains that is part of the largest ice shield in Europe.

The ride around the southwestern part of Iceland was very interesting. As we traveled across a mountain ridge we alternated between lush grass and farmlands and desert-like scenery. Iceland's territory is nearly 40% desert as a result of deforestation by the early settlers. Once the trees were removed for timber, charcoal, and by the livestock eating new growth, the land has eroded and become very barren. A major effort is now being made to reforest the country.

As we drove along we passed through several major lava fields, one of which dated to 1000AD so it was relatively new. In those areas we saw many steam vents, evidence of the volcanic activity close to the surface.

Our trip ended with a quick drive through Reykjavik. The city is impressive for one with only 300,000 population. The old part of the city is quite charming with a lovely park and lots of flowers and statues. There is a lot of new construction going on and there were signs proclaiming the offices of many multinational businesses.

As we sailed away we passed through a little rain squall and once we'd gone through it we saw another rainbow. It wasn't as dramatic as the one we saw the other day but perhaps a good omen for weather for the remainder of our cruise.

Southwest Iceland

Yesterday was a lovely day in Reykjavik, Iceland. There's too much to describe here in a quick post, but here are pictures of two highlights. The top picture is Strokkur geyser. It's in the same geyser field as Geysir, after which all other geysers take their names. Geysir doesn't erupt anymore, but Strokkur erupts every 5 minutes or so. Even after standing there and watching a couple eruptions, even when you expect that it's going to happen, the sudden rush of water is startling.

The bottom picture is from Þingvellir national park. There's a striking rock wall, alongside of which the medieval Icelandic political assembly met. Þingvellir is situated in one of the places where the American and Eurasian plates meet, which accounts for its interesting geography. As our guide demonstrated, the rocky cliffs made for excellent acoustics, which made this a great choice for an assembly location.

Along the way to the boiling mud pits ofNamaskaro, we passed one of Iceland's other unique geological features. This is the only place where the European and North American plates rise above the sea floor. The picture above shows the North American plate on the left and the European on the right. Unlike other plate convergences where the plates are pushing against each other, here in Iceland the plates are actually moving apart so the country is growing. Geologists have evidently figured this out by dating rocks. The oldest have been found at the extreme east and west shores of the island. The land around the cleft and near the mudpits is some of the newest to be found.

Akureyri, Iceland

On our first day in Iceland, we docked in Akureyri, a fairly big city on the north coast. We just came back from our tour, which took us to several interesting natural sites. Most of the tour was spent around Myvatn, a lake about 1 1/2 hours away from Akureyri. Myvatn had an amazing variety of landscapes and features surrounding it - the lake itself is a habitat for waterfowl, which come there to eat the many, many midges that breed in the still waters. Around it, though, are different types of volcanic formations. Our first stop was at an area with sulphurous mud pits and vents, which you can see in the top picture. It smelled terrible, but was fascinating to watch! I made a small movie of a bubbling mud pit which is too big to upload while on the ship, but I'll put it up when we get home. We then also stopped at some lava tube formations, and an area with a number of "pseudo-craters," which are crater-shaped volcanic formations that do not actually have lava coming out of them.

After Myvatn, we stopped at Goðafuss, an impressive waterfall. The name means "god falls," and supposedly they are so named because it's said that here Thorgeir the Lawspeaker, a chieftain in the year 1000, contemplated his decision to rule that Iceland should convert to Christianity. The falls and river are in a gorge that you can't see too well from the road, so it's pretty impressive to be in a fairly flat valley floor, then suddenly come upon this wide, thundering waterfall.