Colours of Iceland 

Iceland is a unique geographical place on Earth.

The island is born of the combination of a hot spot and the Atlantic dorsal separating North-American and Eurasian plates.
Without this hot spot the island will not be visible and will have stayed on the bottom of the sea, like many other places in Atlantic.

The two plates holding the island drift away at a speed of 2 cm per year.

Free space is permanently filled with magam coming from the depth of the Earth.

Around Thingvellir many fractures testify of this permanent activity.

Magma is very close to the surface and rise every 4 or 5 years. You can see everywhere that the volcanism is very active in Iceland : craters, fractures, lava streams, hot waters, smokes, sulphur outcrops,…

A special event happens when a blast occurs under one of the many glaciers of the island : hot melted lava dissolves huge quantities of ice and causes cataclysmic floods.
In 1996, more than 45 000 cube meters per second have covered the desert of Skeiðarársandur.

During blasts and lava stream, many complex minerals can be created (quartz, olivine, mica, jasp, rock cristal, zeolit,…).
Petra’s museum in Stöovarfjörour shows all this wonders. Petra spent his life to search minerals in Iceland and her house is dedicated to their beauty.

Icelandic spar is a clear crystal that has long been looked up for its special properties, very useful for optical instruments.

Zeolits, and especially Sclecits and their thin white needles, are among the most spectacular minerals of Iceland: they are hidden in lava blocks.

The most beautiful ones come from Teigarhorn, near Berufjord .

But do not think that lava is not interesting compared to these minerals wonders.
Even if Icelandic lava is mainly made of basalt, shapes, colours and structures depends of temperature, pressure and environment conditions present while the lava was spread.
Besides consideration of beauty, all this variety gives a lot of information about the way the cataclysm happened.

Basaltic organs are the result of a slow cooling that allowed the shaping of hexagonal structures. Hexagonal shape is the best way to fill an area with a solid structure.

Rope-shaped lava exists if the lava cools when it’s still moving on. Ropes show the direction of the slope when the streams flowed.
Between each rope exists a small vegetal universe, protected from the wind and wet enough.

Pillow lava that you can see in Drekagil is often created when lava erupts under a glacier or the sea and freeze instantaneously, creating these kind of pillows.

In the broken ones, you can see that the inside structures, that cooled much more slowly than the surface, are thinner.

Some lava fields seem chaotic and the edges of the blocks are sharp : they are created when the cooling is distorded by gaseous releases preventing the creation of a smooth and uniform structure.

But the most amazing animal in this mineral bestiary is the pumice-stone. You can find it in Askja, in the Dyngjufjöll moutains. Its main property is to be a stone that can float!
This astonishing characteristic is due to gas bubbles trapped into the stone.

All along the way, the pyramids of stone are not natural: they are called cairns and are used for centuries to mark the path or more often the direction to use.
Adding your own stone to a cairn brings luck.

Laugahraun region is not made of basalt but of rhyolit. Rhyolit contains more silica with a more vitreous consistency, flowed more slowly Obsidian is a vitrified kind when it cools very quickly and it’s sharp and shiny.

Rhyolit oxidation produces all the colours you can see in the landscape, from yellow to red.

Permanent volcanic activity and proximity to the magma creates a natural energy, renewable, without pollution, and cheap : Geothermy. Smoke that you can see rising in the sky of Iceland are coming from plants but from hot water spring steam vapour.

Krafla is one of the geothermic plants of Iceland. It provides electricity for the northern region. It’s placed near one of the most active volcano of the island : Krafla. Hot water is also used directly for heating : water is transported through external pipes whose isolation is such that the water lost only one degree on a 30 kilometers trip and that during winter, you can see snow on the pipes !

The first urban heating system based on geothermy has been installed in the city of Reykjavik in 1930 : more than one hundred houses, an hospital and a school were using this new system. To produce electricity, hot water is captured from 2 000 meters depth.

An easiest way to use hot water springs is to heat greenhouses to produce fruits and vegetables that otherwise would have been imported.

The most common use is for bubbling bath, sauna and hot water swimming pools.

Blue Lagoon is an artificial lagoon whose hot water is supplied by the geothermic plant of Svartsengi : the blue colour of the water is due to the mix of silica and limestone.

Who can say that bananas do not grow in Iceland? The town of Hveragerdi is proud to be one the European banana breeders thanks to its greenhouses and geothermy.