Tom Low - Iceland  Ice and Fire

A Scotsman by birth, Tom now lives in Eastington, Stroud.  Although not a geologist as such, he has a major interest in that subject, hence his involvement with Iceland whose geology is easily observable.  He was there last 3 years ago and goes with a group of people who each have their own specialisation relevant to the trip, for example birds, butterflies or plants.

Tom pointed out that Iceland is at the junction of two tectonic plates, the Eurasian and the North American, which are pulling apart to create the instability and the various phenomena he then went on to describe.

You may well remember the eruption in 2010 of Eyjafjallajökull which the newsreaders of the time had varied success in saying.  Tom showed us a slide of a T-shirt whose writing pronounced it as eye-uh-fyat-luh-yoe-kuutluh.  The eruption brought air travel within its ash-cloud and further afield to a standstill.  A brave (or foolhardy!) Richard Branson beat the ban by sending one of his Virgin planes up into the cloud, the plane emerging unscathed, its engines undamaged by the particles. 

Tom visited Eyjafjallajökull (all together now) on his trip and mentioned that the volcano, although now dormant, has slopes that are still blisteringly hot under foot.

The Icelandic people take advantage of their position over the fault line to heat their properties, generate electricity from steam and raise the temperature of their swimming pools to as much as 42 degrees C, many communities, even small ones, having this facility. Every farm has a borehole for hot water and even the roads and pavements in Reykjavik are heated! 

Tom showed many slides of the various tourist attractions such as the eponymous geyser at Geysir, where a bubble of superheated steam shoots to a height of 70 metres every 15 minutes, the Horse’s Tail Waterfall which you can walk behind and get wet and cold and Mount Hekla, a volcano that erupts every 50 years.  Slides show the Icelandic glaciers are retreating, but records reveal this started in 1911, well before the present idea of man-made climate change came about.

Personally, I am drawn to the study of plate tectonics, vulcanology and seismology and a visit to Iceland is on my bucket list.  I was looking forward with great anticipation to Tom’s talk and I was not disappointed.
Pete Harris