Forty-five minutes drive from Reykjavik is the Thingvellir National Park. It surrounds and protects the largest natural lake in Iceland, Thingvallavatn. The park was founded in 1930 and inscribed with UNESCO in 2004. The bus parked at the north end of the lake where I was able to take some pictures and videos from the viewing platform.
The guide showed us a topographical model of the southwestern part of Iceland. The big white area is a glacier. Reykjavik is coloured red in the bottom right.
Two tectonic plates that form the Mid-Atlantic Rift can be seen on land as the rift valley proceeds from the southwestern point of Iceland up to the north-central part near Akureyri. See more at this post: https://jarvie.ca/dimmuborgir-iceland/ Here you can see the cracks between the two plates. They are separating at a rate of about one inch per year. Very close to the point where these pictures are taken, it is possible to walk between the North American Plate and the Eurasian Plate. More about that in the next post.
The next post takes a walk through the rift to the level of the lake below.
Doug, omg, how awesome and awe-inspiring! This is the closest I have come to seeing the line where those plates meet. Secretly, I have a geology degree from Way Back, so I studied plates and am fascinated by what happens at the edges. I am glad Iceland makes it so welcoming for visitors to bus out to their unusual geologic features and then take the walkways across the wetlands and such. In the one image, the fault line looks like a wall. Thanks for these!
Don’t miss the next post.
definitely would love to see this spot.. walking over this rift does lend itself to a momentous feeling… I recall feeling so very cool when I crossed a line drawn on a road in a tiny village in Indonesia (to mark the equator).. with one step, I moved across hemispheres after all!!
Sailors have a special ceremony for anyone crossing the equator by ship. I joke about having a string of plastic bottles floating on the oceans to mark the equator.
Doug, I love that image of the plastic-demarcated Equator. It would be fun to have big black lines on roadways showing when we are crossing into the next state, province, or country. And especially the Equator, as Vidya experienced.
Your photos and tours are magnificent! I’ll probably never get to Iceland but going on this virtual tour with you was a great way to start my day!