The Arctic Ocean

 

Weirdly, we’ve stayed the last 2 nights in the Icelandic equivalent of Newhalem. I kid you not. We are renting a nice little house in the middle of a highly manicured, hydroelectric company town—it’s sort of surreal, especially since Newhalem has always sort of baseline creeped me out (there is never a soul to be seen, despite swing sets, slides and tennis courts.) It’s pretty much the same here. They even deploy an unmanned robot lawn mower—it apparently mowed all day . . .

We spent the morning walking around the picturesque fjord town of Husavik. Husavik is a fishing town, and the main tourist industry is whale watching and puffin watching tours. Alas, the puffins are gone now and the humpbacks are beginning to depart for the Caribbean. So, we enjoyed a couple hours in the fascinating  Husavik Whale Museum. They displayed fully reconstructed, real whale skeletons—nearly every species of whale found in the Arctic Ocean. They have a full skeleton of a Blue Whale that is 82 feet long!

Through the rib cage of the Blue Whale:

An Orca (Arctic Orcas sound like they are orders of magnitude more ferocious and aggressive than our Southern residents!)

Then it was on to the very northern tip of the Tjornes Peninsula, north of Husavik and only 4 miles below the Arctic Circle.

We walked along the basalt bluff high above the water and it was so unbelievably windy we seriously felt we could be in danger of being blown off. No wonder the hordes of puffins that nest here dig burrows into the small patches of dirt and grass to be found among the basalt columns.

 

A little further on, we came to the actual Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a visible fault line that at the very top of Iceland runs into the Arctic Ocean. This area has the most seismic activity in the country and in December, 1975-February, 1976, a 6.8 earthquake occurred on the Ridge and lava erupted along a quarter mile rift. Below, the Eurasian Plate is on the left and the North American Plate is on the right—Iceland is, literally, being split apart at the average rate of 2 cm a year.

Then we went on to Asbyrgi, the basalt canyon that the waterfall of yesterday, Dettifos, originally ran through. Geologists believe this is part of a canyon that was formed over the very, very short period of days when gargantuan volumes of water flowed out of the north side of the Vatnajokull ice cap from a massive, sub-glacial volcanic eruption. The river later cut a different path, slightly to the west, which is where Dettifoss churns now.

As you now know, the pic below cannot be of an actual live puffin seen by us. But you get the idea.