R-MC Students Travel to Iceland

Front row: Christine Shipyan '10, Catherine Noyes '09, Megan Fitzgerald '10, Kaitlin Nikiforov '11. Back row: Patrick Nugent '11, Billy Campion '11, Bray Wilkins '11, Professor Fenster.

Professor Michael Fenster, Ph.D. (environmental studies) and seven of his students are currently in Iceland in conjunction with the summer course "The Geology of Iceland: A Seam on the Coat of the World." The travel course enables students to examine, analyze and map individual volcanic and glacial features, as well as landscape features produced by the interaction of fire, ice and the ocean.

Fenster began teaching at Randolph-Macon College in 1999. He earned a B.S. and M.S. at the University of Mississippi and a Ph.D. at Boston University, and he conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Virginia. Fenster currently serves as the director of the college’s environmental studies program.

About the Course
Iceland owes its dramatic landscape features to its distinctive geologic setting on top of a tectonic “spreading center,” where magma rises from the Earth’s mantle and “rests” precariously close to or emerges onto the surface—in concert with its geographic position at a high latitude (65° N latitude compared to Ashland’s 37° N latitude). Students are investigating how humans have survived in this harsh geologic environment and they are learning about the rich history and culture of this Nordic country. They are also evaluating the impact of humans on the environment by analyzing—firsthand—contemporary geologic environmental issues such as climate change, soil erosion and renewable energy. Over 80% of Iceland’s energy comes from geothermal and hydrologic sources.

Fenster is sending blog entries—virtual “diaries”—back to the college describing the group’s travel experiences, as well as the history and landscape of Iceland. Read Fenster’s exciting blog entries below—and visit R-MC’s Web site often for updates on this unique travel course.


June 20, 2009

We had a spectacular day today. We rolled off the airplane at 6:00 a.m. and went directly to a town called Keflavik about 30 minutes away from the airport (“Kefla” means “sticks” and “vik” means “bay”). It got its name because of all the big sticks or pieces of wood that fishermen have to deal with in the bay. After a terrific breakfast at our hotel - more

Fenster and students in the mid-Atlantic rift valley.  Note the geothermal power plant in the background.

Students visit a home buried in the 1973 eruption on Heimaey. Note the white chimney in the upper left.

R-MC students climbing the crater of the Elgfell volcano, which last erupted in 1973.

(l-r) Patrick Nuegent, a Viking, Billy Campion, a Viking, Kaitlin Nikiforov, and Bray Wilkins attend a party given by the Canadian ambassador at the government center  in Reykjavik.

European style than American, but definitely unique (I had salmon on a roll with an egg spread and cukes on top), we met Barb Tewksbury from Hamilton College, her husband Dave and her research student Elyse at our hotel. Our guide, Edward Williamson, took us all in a mini bus to three stops along the Reykjanes (pronounced "Wreck Yah Nays") Peninsula. "Reykja" means "smoky" and "nes" means “peninsula.” Put the two together and you can see what it means. Each stop was awe inspiring, breathtaking and truly unbelievable. The scale of volcanic processes that you can walk right up to and look at is truly in a class by itself.

We first visited a place called "Crater Row" which contained "spatter cones" in a line for kilometers and kilometers. These are steep-sided hills of "spatter" built up by lava fountains and central vents that form above fissures (cracks) where magma comes to the Earth's surface. We saw and hiked on many different kinds including one that had had a lava lake in it when it formed a thousand years ago. The lava would fill up the crater to form a lava lake, spill over the sides, fill back up and spill over—over and over again, each time forming a hard crust on the top before it spilled. Then, after it spilled, it flowed down the side of the spatter cone through lava tubes that are now hollow. My student Bray climbed in one to get his picture taken. He wanted to crawl all the way through it, but Barb thought that wasn't a good idea.

Our second stop was truly astonishing. Huge piles— almost mountains—of volcanic material that formed about 12,000 years ago under ice sheets also form a line along the peninsula. We visited the one right on the southwest coast of Iceland on the Atlantic Ocean and it was breathtaking. Here, the Earth literally splits in two and moves in opposite directions so that each year, the U.S. and Europe get father apart from each other. This site showed why Jack Trammell, the director of our summer school program, wanted me to call this course "The Geology of Iceland: The Seam on the Coat of the World." The two pieces of lithosphere move at about the same rate that your fingernails grow, but you could literally see the crack—really a valley—starting on land and then descending down into the Atlantic Ocean. The valley on land had numerous, small shield volcanoes in it and a new power plant that's tapping the hot water beneath the ground but on top of the magma for generating power (electricity) and sending hot water to homes. Then, around the corner from this large mountain of lava, on the ocean, and right in the middle of the valley that I just mentioned, was the most unbelievable beach I have ever seen. The beach was not made of sand, but of boulders the size of about 10-20 bowling balls put together, about 3 feet or more around each. The waves that brought those boulders to that beach must have been enormous!

We ended our field trip at a place with boiling sulfur water (hot springs) and mud pots (a hot spring that carries mostly boiling mud and some water). We hiked all around it while the very hot water spewed steam and sulfur (it was stinky).

We heard lots of great folklore and saw a few interesting animals, including short and cute horses whose lineage comes from horses brought to Iceland by Nordic Vikings. Some of my students want to ride them, but that's not high on my priority list. I did, however, see an advertisement for helicopter rides around Iceland!!

Tomorrow we're off to the Blue Lagoon—a hot bath—next to a geothermal power plant on the Reykjanes Peninsula, then to Reykjavik for museums, map/book collecting and some shopping. Then Tuesday a.m. we visit a geothermal energy plant and then take the ferry boat to the Westman Island, off the south coast of Iceland.

It's now midnight here and the sun has not set. You may know that this is the summer solstice, or longest day of the year. I hope you have enjoyed your day as much as we have.


June 22, 2009

Hello again from Reykjavik.

Today we began the day with another terrific breakfast at Hotel Keflavik before heading to the Blue Lagoon, the outfall from the geothermal energy plant. Our guide, Edward, picked us up in a four-wheel-drive converted Ford van that had huge tires on it, stood about 3-4 feet off the ground, and required a step ladder to get into. He said we would need it to get to some of the places we plant to go later in the week—like the volcano Hekla.

Barb Tewksbury, a structural geologist from Hamilton College who happened to meet up with us on the Reykjanes Peninsula yesterday, told me that she has used the vehicle to drive across a 3 foot deep river in northern Iceland. We plan to use it to drive off the road to reach a volcano named Hekla. Today, while in the Settlement Exhibit (more later), the museum director told us that he had heard on the news that Hekla erupts every 10 years and that the government has issued a warning about the possibility of another one soon. That’s bad news given that we plan to hike up its flanks this weekend. Thankfully, volcanoes usually issue warnings... but I'm jumping ahead.

After breakfast, we spent the day pretty much relaxing in a big steamy hot bath at the Blue Lagoon. We had pushed ourselves hard for two days, so slowing down felt nice. Although touristy (it is the #1 destination for tourists in Iceland), it was fun. It reminded me a bit of the bath houses in Austria because of the hot water you could relax in and the waterfalls that you could stand under… except this was a BIG one, and you could put natural white paste—which is really silica mud—on your face and skin. It’s supposed to heal blemishes on your skin.

Edward went with us and I enjoyed getting to talk to him in the “lagoon.” I learned, for example, that Edward also volunteers for a search and rescue team that rescues people from mountains and glaciers when they get lost or caught in pickles. He told me that technology has improved rescue operations dramatically. For example, in the “old” days, people weren’t reported missing until they didn’t show up at home some time after their adventures were supposed to end and families got worried. Now, with communication and GPS devices, they know right when people get in trouble and right where they are, so they can go and pick them up much faster. He drives a Ski Doo on the snow and ice and takes part in about three missions every year.

After the Blue Lagoon, we took off for the capital city of Reykjavik, where we checked into our hotel and then headed to the old part of town. After a brief driving tour by Edward (he wears a headphone set with a microphone while driving us around), including driving by a church with a columnar basalt facade, and the building on Reykjavik Harbor where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held their famous Reykjavik Summit and considered banning all ballistic missiles, we went straightaway to the Settlement Exhibit.

Barb Tewksbury was right: It was amazing. We had a personalized tour from the director of the exhibit of one of the first Viking houses on the island. The Viking house and artifacts from this period are preserved in the lower level of a hotel next to the harbor. With the help of geologists, the archeologists dated the site accurately to 871 +/- 2 years because geologists know the year (871) that an ash layer from a volcano about 400 kilometers to the east fell from the atmosphere and landed onto a stone fence that surrounded one of the Viking’s houses. Fortunately, the ash layer also landed on the Greenland ice sheet and geologists dated the ash layer (really tephra) that got incorporated into the ice there. After the eruption and after the Vikings left the site, the tephra layer—and the village—got preserved under about two meters of wind-blown sediment and organic matter. More than 1100 years later, construction workers discovered the village in 2001 when new construction began on this site.

Unlike America (as I was told), construction crews who locate potentially important archeological findings stop to study and preserve them. In this case, the findings represent the earliest (oldest) Viking village on Iceland. Sadly, the findings debunked the Icelandic legend that Ingólfur Arnarson, the first settler on Iceland, established the site for the settlement (now the city of Reykjavik) by allowing pillars to float in the ocean and taking their landing spot on shore as an omen of where to build the first settlement site. The archeologists can learn a lot about the Vikings by studying the buildings and the materials found around the site—like metal, glass and wood objects. That reminds me, we also drove by a new museum between Keflavik and Reykjavik that houses a replica Viking ship. The museum had only been open for one week and has huge glass windows that allowed us to see the whole ship without going into the museum. And, speaking of Vikings, a few of us stopped to have our pictures taken with Vikings who were guarding the Reykjavik government center. Apparently, the Canadian Ambassador threw a party for locals to celebrate Canada Day and used the Vikings as "bouncers"—and we weren't on the invitation list!

After lunch…and by the way I had mink whale for lunch…our group split up and had a few hours to poke around Reykjavik. I didn’t feel great about eating whale because I don’t want to support whale hunting, but Edward assured me that the Icelanders practice excellent conservation. In fact, the Iceland government removed a ban on whaling a couple of years ago that they had established in 1986. My group assured me that it was best to use the meat that way since the whalers had already claimed the whale. In any case, it was only a once in a lifetime opportunity for me and it was delicious! It tasted a lot like a “regular” steak.

After lunch, we split up for some "free time" in Reykjavik where we all did a little shopping and a few of us went to a café for chocolate cake and coffee. It really hit the spot!

After a long walk along the harbor back to the hotel and a shower, we walked back to town for dinner at the Carusa. Now back in the hotel room, I’m planning tomorrow’s adventures that consist of a tour of a geothermal energy power plant and a 2.5 hour ferry boat ride (I was told the ferry holds 200-300 cars!) to the Westmann Islands. We plan to hike straight up the newly formed volcano whose lava flow in 1973 claimed about one-third of the town of Heiemaey on the Westmann Island. Barb told us that if you dig down a bit at the top, you can still feel the heat of the lava from this eruption. We’ll spend the next day on the island as well, then head back. Believe it or not, my students want to make it a priority to have puffin for one of our meals. I’ll let you know how it goes.

As they say in Iceland for “goodbye" 
Bless,
Michael Fenster

June  22-23, 2009

Wednesday marked yet another memorable day on our Icelandic journey. We started the day with breakfast in Reykjavik and then, on a cloudy and sometimes rainy morning, we drove in our guide’s “super van” (more about the van in a later entry) about 30 minutes southeast to the newest geothermal energy power plant on Iceland – Orkuveita Reykjavíkur. Although we arrived with a couple of tour buses full of people, after a little while, the tourists left and we had the tour of a lifetime with our own personal tour guide. The facility had excellent exhibits including an earthquake room that simulates earthquakes of various magnitudes. The people who run power plants “worry” about earthquakes because they have pipes that transport hot water and power lines that deliver electricity to the people of Iceland and an earthquake could do substantial damage to those. To reduce the potential risk to these systems, the engineers developed a pipe system that “gives” with earthquakes. The pipes, about 1 meter above the ground, will run straight for a while, then take a 90 degree turn, then another, then another and then go straight for a while longer only to repeat the pattern. Fortunately, Iceland will never have earthquakes as big or that last as long as those in California, because Iceland sits on top of a different kind of tectonic plate boundary than California, so it will experience shallower earthquakes. Still, the earthquakes can reach 7.0 on the Richter scale – certainly large enough for everyone who has lived on the island to have felt one and to have caused substantial damage. I guess it’s the geologist in me, but I hope we get to feel one before we leave.

After seeing a video about and getting a short talk on how this company uses super hot steam from below the ground to generate electricity, our guide took us to platforms that overlook the actual rooms where all the action happens. I was struck by how quiet the facility was given the huge generators and turbines (4 of each) in the room. By the way, our tour guide, as do many people in Iceland, spoke perfect English –without an accent. You would think that English was his first language. When I asked him how he learned to speak English so well, he said what several others have said when I asked them that question – from watching TV!

After finishing up at the plant, we went to Þorlákshöfn to catch the ferry to Heimaey or what the locals call Vestmannaeyjar (Westmann Islands). The Westmann Islands got their name from the Irish slaves (Celtic/Irish men from lands to the west of Norway) who fled there after killing their master Hjörleifur of Hjöleifshöfði. Unfortunately, for the slaves, Hjörleifur’s brother-in-law, Ingólfur Arnarson found them on Heimaey and ended their lives.

The Vestmannaeyjar make up 13 islands but Heimaey is the only island that people live on. It is quite an amazing site to come into the harbor after traveling across the Atlantic for 2.5 hours on turquoise blue water. The islands only exist because of their location on top of a spreading or rift zone that has piled lava on the sea floor and over time built up to extend above sea level. In fact, there are many “islands” under the ocean that you cannot see from a boat or plane. The north end of the island has very steep and tall cliffs that are made of magma that came to the Earth’s surface beneath glaciers that were in this area about 10,000 years ago – and that’s what you see when approaching the island by ferry. But these rocks only make up the very north end of the island, and if that’s all the lava that came there, it would be a tall, but very small island. Fortunately for the people of Vestmannaeyjar, another volcano – one like you would see in Hawaii – erupted under the sea, built itself up, and created lava flows about 2,000 years ago that connected to the older 10,000-year-old rocks. The entire village of Vestmannaeyjar (which by the way is the largest village in Iceland with more than 5,000 inhabitants) is built on the lava from this volcano named Helgafell.

However, and unfortunately for the people of Vestmannaeyjar, another very violent volcano popped up out of the sea and erupted for 6 months – from January 23 to July 3 – in 1973. This is the event that John McPhee wrote about in his trilogy, “The Control of Nature.”  His chapter is called “Cooling the Lava” because the Civil Defense Corps in Reykjavik came up with the idea to pump water on the lava to try to keep it from burying the entire village of Vestmannaeyjar. It was a very tough fight and the people finally won, but not before the village incurred a lot of destruction – including the burying of hundreds of homes under the lava and the piling of cinders up to the second floor of homes. In fact, some of the roofs collapsed under the weight of the cinders and so the rescue teams had crews that spent all of their time shoveling the cinders off the rooftops. The locals called this stuff “black rain.” After our guide, Eunoch, picked us up from the ferry, he took us to an outdoor exhibit before checking into our hostel where you can see the tops of some of the homes as crews dig them out from under the lava. The exhibit is known as “modern Pompeii.” Some of the people who owned these homes don’t like this idea.

We arrived to Vestmannaeyjar about 3:00 in the afternoon wrapped in a beautiful blue and puffy white clouded sky. We had planned to depart the island the next morning at 8:00 a.m., so we had to hit the floor running again – and boy did we! Good thing the sun never sets here in June.

So… as a first matter of business, we decided to climb the 220 meters to the top of the notorious Eldfell volcano. It took us about 20 minutes to walk the crater flank to the rim of the volcano for the most amazing view of the island and the mainland. There, right in front of us stood the massive subglacial cliffs, Helgfell, and of course the crater of Eldfell and its destructive lava beneath us. After some time on the top – and for a while staying warm up there by sitting, lying, or standing on the warm volcanic tuff that makes up the rim (it's still hot a few centimeters beneath the surface as steam continues to rise from hot lava beneath the volcano’s rim), we scurried down the volcano where Enoch picked us up in the big bus and off we went to the harbor to catch a private boat ride around the entire island. It was superb!

Turns out that a family-run business was taking care of us – the dad was the boat captain, the son was the bus driver, the mom made our dinner at the café. We had to wait a bit for the captain to take us because he was repairing their big tour bus as they were expecting 1,000 kids the next day for a big soccer tournament on the island. Once he got that repair taken care of, we shoved off about 6:00 in the afternoon for the ride of a lifetime! The ride beheld some magnificent scenery, including a huge elephant head on the side of a cliff made from columnar basalt, puffin and guillemot watching, but I have to say that the highlight happened when the boat captain pulled into a sea cave with our boat, turned off the engine, pulled out a saxophone and played a beautiful ballad.

Homemade pizza dinner and chocolate cake at the family café hit the spot. We also got to watch the movie “Volcano,” about the 1973 eruption, while eating dinner so that we could get a real feel for what it was like before, during and after the eruption. After dinner, the students walked to our hostel and I stayed around to talk with Unner (the mom) and Simmi (the dad). We talked for 2 hours. Turns out that Simmi and Unner last year rented a Harley Davidson motorcycle with 16 other Icelanders on Harleys and took 6 weeks to drive from Los Angeles to Orlando along Rt. 66. They were very proud of the Iceland magazine that featured their trip with two full pages of color pictures.

A trip to the café and a walk to the hostel ended this remarkable day. Just a few sunny hours later, we would awaken, hop on the ferry back to the mainland, and greet the 1,000 soccer kids waiting to take “our” ferry back to Vestmannaeyjar for a day of soccer.




For more information on R-MC’s Environmental Studies program, visit http://www.rmc.edu/academics/environmental-studies.aspx