Iceland Volcano Quotes

The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.

That damned volcano

Iceland, the land of frost and fire, rugged glaciers and smoldering volcanoes,

When Iceland’s volcano exploded and spewed ash all over Europe, blocking out the skies in 2010, I knew what the earth felt like, because that eruption is what love feels like to a human body.

Although they made it their own, the Vikings were not the first explorers of the North Atlantic. For at least two centuries before the beginning of the Viking Age, Irish monks had been setting out in their curachs in search of remote islands where they could contemplate the divine in perfect solitude, disturbed only by the cries of seabirds and the crashing of the waves on the shore. The monks developed a tradition of writing imrama, travel tales, the most famous of which is the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis (The Voyage of St Brendan the Abbot). The Navigatio recounts a voyage purported to have been made by St Brendan (d. c. 577) in search of the mythical Isles of the Blessed, which were believed to lie somewhere in the western ocean. The imrama certainly show a familiarity with the North Atlantic–the Navigatio, for example, describes what are probably icebergs, volcanoes and whales–but they also include so many fantastical and mythological elements that it is impossible to disentangle truth from invention. There is no evidence to support claims that are often made that St Brendan discovered America before the Vikings, but Irish monks certainly did reach the Faeroe Islands and Iceland before them. Ash from peat fires containing charred barley grains found in windblown sand deposits at Á Sondum on Sandoy in the southern Faeroes has been radiocarbon-dated to between the fourth and sixth centuries AD. Although no trace of buildings has yet been found, the ash probably came from domestic hearths and had been thrown out onto the sand to help control erosion, which was a common practice at the time. As peat was not used as a fuel in Scandinavia at this time but was widely used in Britain and Ireland, this evidence suggests that seafaring Irish monks had discovered the Faeroes not long after Ireland’s conversion to Christianity. No physical traces of an Irish presence in Iceland have been found in modern times, but early Viking settlers claimed that they found croziers and other ecclesiastical artefacts there. There are also two papar place-names (see here) associated with Irish monks, Papos and Papey, in the east of Iceland. The monks, all being celibate males, did not found any permanent self-sustaining communities in either place: they were always visitors rather than settlers.

In the sagas of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle, the scholar-adventurer burned his candle to a nub as he pored over quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. A map drawn in faded ink, a cryptic document in Latin fell into his fingers. From such glimmerings, a glorious excursion into terra incognita unfurled, as the scholar’s team wound through an Icelandic volcano down to the center of the earth or traversed a lost Venezuelan plateau teeming with dinosaurs. As

Volcanologists have a tendency to drift westward in the United States because that's where the action is tectonically. North and Central America occupy the western portion of a big slab of the earth's crust known as the North American plate, which is shaped roughly like an inverted triangle. The bottom of the triangle is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean halfway between South America and Africa. The top two corners are north of Siberia and northwest of Greenland. This piece of the earth's crust is constantly jockeying for position with the tectonic plates that surround it. In some places, like Iceland, the North American plate is pulling away from an adjoining plate, and molten material is welling up to fill the gap. In other places, like California, the North American plate is slipping past an adjoining plate, often getting stuck and then breaking free in earthquake-inducing jolts. But the most dramatic and dangerous of these plate interactions occur in the Pacific Northwest. There, in a line from southern British Columbia to Northern California, a small piece of oceanic crust is being forced under the edge of the North American plate at the rate of a few inches per year.

Just north of here, on the far side of the impenetrable Vatnajokull ice sheet, lava is spewing from a crack in the earth on the flanks of Bardarbunga, one of Iceland’s largest volcanoes.