Iceland: Fire, Ice, and the Edge of the World

Few destinations on earth inspire the kind of awe that Iceland does before a traveler even sets foot on its soil. The very name conjures images of a world in perpetual transformation, a place where the raw forces that shaped the planet remain visible on the surface every single day, where glaciers grind slowly toward the sea while volcanoes push new land upward from below, where the sky performs extraordinary shows of dancing light on winter nights and refuses to go dark on summer evenings. Iceland is a land of superlatives and contradictions. It is simultaneously one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe and one of the most visited destinations on earth in per capita terms. It has the world's oldest continuously operating parliament and one of the most progressive political cultures anywhere on the planet. It produces more writers, musicians, and artists per capita than almost any other nation, yet it is home to just over 370,000 people. It ranks year after year as the world's most peaceful country, the most gender-equal, among the happiest, and among the most literate, while sitting atop one of the most geologically violent patches of ground anywhere on earth.

Iceland sits at the meeting point of the North Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean, just below the Arctic Circle, straddling the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are slowly pulling apart. This unique geological circumstance has given the island everything from its fierce volcanic activity to its extraordinary geothermal energy wealth. The ground here breathes and steams. Hot springs bubble up from the earth in fields and valleys. Geysers shoot columns of boiling water into the cold air. Lava fields stretch for miles, still so young they look like the surface of another planet. Glaciers, some of them vast beyond imagination, cover roughly eleven percent of the total land area, and from their edges, icebergs calve into lagoons of startling blue-green clarity.

Europe's westernmost country, Iceland occupies a position at the very edge of the known world that resonated powerfully with the Norse settlers who arrived in the ninth century and called it simply what it appeared to be. Reykjavík, the capital, is the world's most northerly capital city, a compact, colorful, and surprisingly sophisticated metropolis perched at the southwestern corner of the island, looking out toward the open Atlantic. From Reykjavík's waterfront on a clear day, the Snæfellsnes glacier is visible on the horizon fifty kilometers to the north, a reminder that wildness is never far away in Iceland.

The country has more active volcanoes than any other in Europe, more geothermal activity than virtually anywhere on earth, more than ten thousand waterfalls by some estimates, black sand beaches that look like the surface of the moon, fjords carved by glaciers to an extraordinary depth, and a Viking heritage preserved in a body of medieval literature, the Icelandic sagas, that has no parallel in any other culture. The Atlantic puffin breeds here in the millions. Humpback whales, minke whales, and sometimes the blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived on earth, are regular visitors to Iceland's rich coastal waters. Arctic foxes, the only native land mammal, pad across the highland snow. The Icelandic horse, a small, shaggy, extraordinarily tough breed kept genetically isolated since the Viking Age, performs a fifth gait unique in the horse world called the tölt.

This is a country that operates at extremes. Summer brings the midnight sun, with twenty-four hours of daylight around the summer solstice and the strange, beautiful disorientation of hiking at midnight under a sun that never quite sets. Winter brings long nights but also the aurora borealis, the northern lights, that blaze across the sky in curtains of green, sometimes purple, sometimes white, a natural phenomenon that has drawn travelers from around the world for decades and still stops even the most experienced Iceland visitor in their tracks the first time they look up and see the sky on fire with cold light.

Geography and Landscape

Iceland covers approximately 103,000 square kilometers, making it roughly the size of the state of Kentucky or slightly larger than Ireland. It lies in the North Atlantic between 63 and 66 degrees north latitude, with the Snæfellsnes Peninsula almost exactly touching the Arctic Circle and the island of Grímsey, lying just off the north coast, straddling it directly. The island is the second largest in Europe after Great Britain, though its population of just over 370,000 is among the smallest of any comparable landmass.