Iceland
is one of the more interesting places either of us has ever visited.
It is, first and foremost, not nearly as cold as it sounds.
It was mostly in the 50s when we were there and, while it does
have a few glaciers, is largely green – as opposed to
Greenland
, which is almost entirely covered by ice.
It was given the name of
Iceland
by early Viking settlers around the year 1000 A.D. because of all the
pack ice they saw on the western and northern shores – pack ice that
was floating over from
Greenland
! Although it is just south
of the
Arctic
circle (probably making it the most extreme latitudinal large-scale
civilization on earth), it is warmed by the nearby gulf stream, keeping
its temperatures fairly moderate year round.
The country is fairly small, about the size of
Ohio
, and after years of Viking, Norse, and Danish rule, has been
independent since 1940. It
has a small population of less than 300,000, half of which live in and
around
Reykjavik
. It is considered part of
Europe
and in general was very Scandinavian.
Its position as the only major land mass that lies
directly on the boundary of the North American and Eurasian continental
plates meet makes it a playground for naturalists.
On
Iceland
, the earth’s crust is only 1/3 the average thickness found on the
rest of the planet. It’s a
volcanic island that has a disproportionate share of the world’s
volcanic activity, earthquakes, glaciers, geysers, geothermal
hot springs
, lava fields, fumaroles, mudpots, and craters.
It’s also, geologically speaking, quite young – only about
18mm years old.
One really interesting tidbit about the Icelandic
people is their naming conventions.
All people take, as a last name, their father’s first name with
the suffix “son” or “dottir” – and they never change it for
life. This can lead to the
quite unusual (by our standards) circumstance of having a four-person
family with four different last names!
The father could be named Jon Ericsson (the son of Eric), the
mother could be named Jan Einarsdottir (the daughter of Einar), and the
children could be named Gundar Jonsson and Christien Jonsdottir.