Iceland

A Land of Puzzles

In groups of five, pupils were engaged with the task of unravelling some particularly intriguing landscape puzzles.

The tectonic puzzle centred on the site of the Viking parliament at Thingvellir and the nearby Nesjavellir geothermal power station. Both are within an impressive section of the Mid Atlantic rift valley between the Eurasian and North American plates.

The Solheimajokull was our glacial puzzle; Iceland’s most active volcano, the subglacial volcano Katla, periodically supplies basalt and water in untold quantities to a tongue of ice now retreating 100m every year. Katla conspires to compete with the discharge of the Amazon and boasts the world’s largest lava field (which we also visited).

Our fluvial puzzles were the great waterfalls, Gullfoss and Seljandsfoss: these are regrading cliff lines abandoned by combinations of isostatic readjustments and Jokulhaup (glacier burst) aggradation. If you had landed on Iceland 5,000 years ago there would have been no ice at all.

The black basalt beach and sand dunes of Vik, Iceland’s most southerly point, hosted our coastal puzzle. The Arctic terns were not happy to be left off the risk assessment and, in their hundreds, proceeded to dive bomb our psammosere explorers. The Marburian response: to charge!

Learning and Wonder

The pupils were notable for their academic curiosity and interest. There were only outdoor field sessions - no classroom sessions - on this trip and much of the learning came through a sense of awe and wonder at encounters and adventures of a very special Icelandic kind.

Swimming and mudding in the sulphurous, hot, lava wastelands of the Blue Lagoon were magical delights. White water rafting and jumping into basalt canyons on the warmest and sunniest Icelandic day this year will yield a lifetime of memories. Standing beneath the spray and rainbows of Iceland’s ‘Niagara’ Skogarfoss, standing beside Iceland’s own Geysir, trailing two Minke whales in the bay off Reykjavik, looking south from the Dyrholaey basalt columns across the open water of unforgiving seas towards Antarctica, befriending the Loftsalir cliff Puffins and circling the Kerid crater lake all took our Marlburians to the heart of this subject.