WATERFALLS OF ICELAND NIAGARA WITHOUT THE KITSCH

 

They say, if you were to count every waterfall in Iceland from the smaller cascades over rocks to Dettifoss, the waterfall with the highest volume of water in all of Europe, the number would reach over a thousand!  This in a country that could easily fit into central Texas!  If I were to show you all the waterfall pictures I took, you would practically feel like you were being water-boarded!  I promise I won’t do that but oh, what an impressive sight they are. 

I had gone with pre-knowledge of the tectonic sites there, that there would be rifts, and bubbling mud pots and steaming rivers, but the number of waterfalls and how spectacular they were took me by surprise.  We took a 10 mile, round trip, hike up a river bed that included, and I am sure I missed some, 26 waterfalls in the span of 5 miles!  Why don’t our local rivers do that? Why is it we may hike 5 miles, or more to see one waterfall?  Ah, because of the different geology in our countries.

I was ready for rifts; Iceland is the above water view of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.  Here you can see what it looks like to have two huge continental plates pulling apart from one another. Iceland owes its existence to the fact that for millions of years the North American plate has been pulling apart from the Eurasian plate, creating new land from the magma oozing up through the rift.  Consequently you have spreading valleys, erupting volcanoes, rivers that boil, and, as it turns out, tons of waterfalls.

Picture a river peacefully going along when it encounters a rift valley. The water will plummet over the rift creating a waterfall, and if that river keeps crisscrossing that rift, as it does along this hike, then you can be treated to 26 waterfalls in the space of 5 miles! 

No two are exactly alike either, some are wider, some are at right angles to each other, many make rainbows, some allow you to climb behind them but what they all have in common is none of them have accompanying souvenir stands. Yay!  No waterfalls in a snow globe, (maybe that would be hard to do!) but they are simply unfettered by commercialism and one can hope that will continue.  Perhaps this delights me because my husband is  from Buffalo and I have probably been to Niagara some 30 times and commercialism is its middle name.

Iceland, interestingly, is new to tourism.  Ever since the 2010 eruption of that unpronounceable (as are most places) volcano, Eyjafjallajokull, which disrupted air travel to and from Europe for weeks, tourism has increased.  It put Iceland on the map and I guess the thrill of not knowing if your tour bus would be swallowed up by lava drew the tourists like lemmings.  Add a pretty unstable Europe at the moment and it seems to be the “go to” country at the moment.  Hopefully “waterfalls in a snow globe” won’t be a thing of the future and it will stay as Eden-like in it’s beauty as it is now.

About those unpronounceable destinations, you would be surprised how hard that makes it for your memory to put a name on where you have been.  “Foss” at the end of a word means waterfall, so that helps a bit, but still, I couldn’t tell you which “foss” was which for the 17 letters with only a vowel here or there before it easily confuses a mind like mine.

Bottom line, a country whose land is lifting in some areas, pulling apart in others makes for unforgettable scenery.  Next time, we can talk about how geology is the explanation behind what I thought was unusual.  Gulls and other sea birds were often inland and not by the sea at all and it turns out geology can explain that too. 

Till then, earth scientists, think about your own area and there will be some geologic reason why it looks that way it does.  I always say, if I had only come to Texas some 250 million years earlier I would have still been at the beach!