Iceland at Noon

Hello there.

I just returned from a tour through the Mid Atlantic Ridge here and Iceland and I must say, it was very beautiful. The cliffs tower above you and you feel like you are walking through an open cave. I took lots of pictures so I will add those in here too. I brought my big parka, but I ended up not needing it because it was a beautiful day! The weather was around 65 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 18 degrees Celsius. Going through the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was really intriguing because I have been studying plate tectonics for years, and I have only seen boundaries from helicopters, but actually being able to be on the ground and imagine myself standing on top of a plate boundary (even though I wasn’t actually standing on the boundary because it is impossible to stand on molten rock as it is pouring up slowly. I was in reality just standing on a plate, but it was cool to put myself there). What I actually was saw was a rock outcrop on the easternmost edge of the North American plate

The Mid Atlantic Ridge is a divergent boundary, which is where two lithospheric plates (in this case the Eurasian and the North American plates) move away from each other. Most divergent boundaries lie along the ocean floor and have rift valleys, which are deep valleys at the center of a mid ocean ridge. The rift valley forms the boundary between the two plates. Molten rock forces it’s way upward through cracks along the valley. This molten rock cools, hardening into new oceanic crust.

I studied the Mid-Atlantic Ridge quite a bit before I came because I wanted to be able to understand what I was seeing, and in my research I found a lot of interesting things that I had no idea existed. I learned that Matthew Fontaine Maury wondered that it could have been there in 1850 which was so cool because I didn’t know they had the technology to do that in that time period. It was actually discovered during the expedition of the Challenger in 1972. This expedition was led by a scientist by the name of Charles Wyville Thomson who discovered a large rise in the middle of the Atlantic while he was scouting out the future location for a transatlantic telegraph cable.

Some characteristic features of a divergent boundary are: mid-ocean ridges, rift valleys, earthquake activity, and volcanic activity.

I have had an amazing three days here. I went on tours and hikes and explored towns and it completely exceeded my expectations. I’m not going to go into a deep explanations about what I did because this would turn into a novel, but I will say I went to the Gullfoss Waterfall, Aurora Borealis, Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, and the Skaftafell ice cave. I have attached some pictures of my activites below.