What shall be saved?

Did I mention doom-scrolling about the seismic shenanigans near Grindavík on the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland? I did. And not that Iceland, Dr Hilarious! It's been clear for a couple of years now, that tectonic plate grinding has stepped up a notch in Reykjanes. It was only when the best geological data and their interpretation indicated an evacuation in the middle of the night that international media started to notice. Metafilter was ahead of the curve and our hands have been held there by a native Viking by name Kattullus, altho he is currently resident in Finland.

One of the boots-on-the-ground journalists has been Jón from The Reykjavik Grapevine, who has been getting as close to The Grindavík epicentre as the authorities will allow. On Tuesday, 3 whole days since the emergency evacuation, residents were allowed back to their homes for salvage / triage. On the assumption that the whole town, or at least their own neat home and garden, could be  obliviated in a few minutes of hot-rock encounter. Young Jón was in the privileged, ringside, position of having his own parents retired to spend the twilight of their years in . . . Grindavík! Accordingly the took their pace in a long queue of traffic heading back into the ghost town to salve a) his uncle's car b) whatever his parents could fit in their car. They had been ahead of the posse at the end of the last week because they elected to leave before they had to leave and so had a bit more calm time to process the decision-making process. They also possessed a car-trailer! And a son with his own gaff a long way from the pulsing magma chamber that threatened to destroy everything they owned.

Having this second chance to retrieve tier-two chattels put me in mind of my favorite apocalypse book The Day of the Triffids. For 12 y.o. me, the best part is when they find a three-ton truck, drive up to the loading dock of a big department store and have to decide what to take. Jón's folks have already off-sited the photo-albums remember. It's interesting that the first thing to negotiate is broken glass in the hallway - evidence of earthquake. Then we see two of them carrying out a bed-sized TV screen and squeeze that in their hatchback. A neighbour drives by with a mountain bike on the roof-rack; another trots out of his home with a suitcase. The poignancy of the situation is captured by a zoom in on a couple of handwritten notices stuck in street-facing windows: Engi Her í Húsinu [Nobody at home] and Farin [Gone!].

I can't criticize anyone here. It's 2 months shy of 30 years when I had a few minutes to make a night-time decision about what stuff to save from an incipient conflagration. I saved two horses and one desktop computer. 

Update 0920: same day yesterday at 3pm, the newly installed SO₂ gas detectors in Grindavík went off with a whoop and the police and civil defense evacuated the last 90 folks in town . . . in 95 seconds. You may fantasize about out-running lava but you can't event see SO₂ [tho you sure as heck can smell it] so you might be running straight into a ground hugging pocket of the stuff. Remember Lake Nyos? Same principle. Sulphur dioxide boils out of magma solution as the pressure drops so its presence topside indicates magma nearer the surface.

The Earth Moves

In 2010, when Eyjafjallajökull lost its lunch and closed down European air-travel our own Dau.I and Dau.II, then 14 and 16, had an awf'y big adventure. They had chosen to go visit an old friend in Switzerland and had to repatriate themselves 1930s style by trains and boat and trains and boat. It brought into familial focus just how active Iceland can be. The island sits right on the boundary between the NorthAmerican and Eurasian tectonic plates which are, with more shrieking and grinding than the T in Boston, moving apart. 

The Reykjanes peninsula is where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (a divergent / constructive plate boundary) pops out of the sea for the first time since the Açores.The capital Reykjavik sits in the oxter of the peninsula to the North; with Keflavik Intl Airport out along the coast on the end of the Northside. I've flagged the fishing village of Grindavik because it's in The News today. And Metafilter since 7th Nov! The ▲ nearby represents the volcano Fagradalsfjall. Eyjafjallajökull is shown as another ▲130km due East.

Reykjanes has been in The News for the last two years because, after Fagradalsfjall erupted in Spring 2021, a swarm of earthquakes triggered a boost to volcatourism. Being conveniently close to Reykjavik and the airport, a lot of people turned up thinking of Mordor. Over the last tuthree weeks of 2023 another surge of tectonic rumbles has occurred just to the North of the working fishing town of Grindavík and even closer to two major infrastructural projects in the middle of the peninsula. 

1) The Svartsengi [black meadow] geothermal power station. Since 1976, this plant has been using the hot water to drive turbines to make electricity and adding that to the national grid. It also supplies hot-water for district heating in Reykjavik 45km NE. That's kinda neat, yes? Iceland, as it says on the tin, is cold in Winter but magma hot just under the surface. Steam central heating for an entire community is just a matter of pipework and maintenance. We otoh are burning wood and fossil fuel and destroying the planet.

2) The other local money-mill complex is the Blue Lagoon hydrothermal spa resort. "Healing waters. A subterranean spa. Gourmet cuisine. Luxurious suites. Otherworldly vistas. A universe of radiant wellbeing." This commercial venture battens onto the downstream effluent from Svartsengi insulating the clientele with plush towelling robes from any feelings of Mordourism. After holding out for rather longer than geological experts were comfortable with, The Blue Lagoon shuttered its facilities for a week at 0700hrs on the 9th November - to not hazard the lives of their employees. There had been a bigger shock than usual 6½ hours earlier, just after midnight, and ~40-50 spa-clients bottled out and hailed taxis to get them outta here.

Last night things got fizzy and the Civil Defense ordered up a fleet of buses to carry out the evacuation of Grindavík. They will be camping out in sports halls until the situation resolves itself. Everyone is hoping that the magma, which has uplifted the black meadow 8cm in the last two week will unzip to the North and spill out across the uninhabited part of peninsula off towards Keflavik. But precautionary principle applies. Lava can travel faster than a child can run and might arrive in town in 10-15 minutes. Better to spend a few days camping in a dry heated hall.

The last town-threatening eruption in Iceland was on Heimaey in Jan 1973 [bloboprev]. There, after evacuating the town, residual volunteers and civil defense folk sprayed 6 million tonnes of icy seawater at the lava face and stopped it from filling in their harbour. Some of the people of Heimaey never went back to daily island hardship and stayed on the mainland . . . in Grindavík!

Sankt Hans Afen

You're allowed to have a bonfire tonight [you'll never take me alive surveillance drones!] because it is the eve of the feast of St John the Baptist. Festa de São João do Porto or Fogueres de Sant Joan, Alicante It's the solstice counterpoise to Christmas.

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Sprakkar

Because of a comment by Icelandophile Professor Batty, and subsequent to-fro, I've gone deep on Eliza Reid, who will cease being Forsetafrú = First Lady this summer after two terms. I've been reading her The Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World (1922). It's a deep dive into Europe's most equal society through the voices of not-men who have shaped and benefitted from that playing field - still bumpy but A Lot flatter than, say, Ireland's - let alone Iranland!  

Reid, who grew up in rural Ontario, apparently met her Icelandic husband Guðni Jóhannesson on a blind-date  . . . in Oxford, when they were both there as students. He came home and soon landed a faculty position in University of Iceland. He's a 20thC historian who had articulate and sensible things to say about The Cod Wars with UK and the Banking Collapse. When the long-term President finally retired in 2016 then fans-friends-and-relations urged Guðni to run for the office and he won the election quite convincingly. His bookish, entrepreneurial wife thus became First Lady and a reluctant fashion-icon - she didn't stop shopping in charity shops just because she had to attend state banquets around the World. She also famously penned an OpEd for the NYT basically saying "ég er ekki handtaska mannsins míns" = I am not my husband's handbag. In other words, the partner of the powerful [man] may be the power behind the throne and is, for sure, not a decorative cipher.

The book is Reid's homage to the women of her adopted country; and she carried out her research at farms, quaysides, C-suites and saunas. One of her informants shared an obscure word which appears six times in the eddas: Sprakki = an extraordinary woman; plural Sprakkar. It became a shoo-in to incorporate the word into the title of her book. Contrary to Reid's assertions in some of her many interviews and pieces-to-camera, Icelandic is not the only European language to have a respectful, slightly frightening, noun describing any class of woman. Irish has cailleach for starters. Jenni Nuttall has logged a long list of ♀-pejoratives in English. None of which I'll repeat here because there's quite enough slaggin' of women when they don't conform to door-mat.

Sprakkar has an essay about Cap'n Dóra Unnarsdóttir, [R - be very afraid] a fish-whisperer who conjures cod from the wild Atlantic. She sat her Ship Captain's exam in 2012 filling the sea-boots of her father and grandfather before her. She suffered through a period of ribbing by the other fishermen, but that was replaced by respeck when she reliably reached her quotas quicker than they did  . . . and slagged back when they teased her.

In the corridors of power, one force is the FKA Félag Kvenna í Atvinnulífinu (Association of Women Business Leaders). Which is still smaller than it should be. But one of Reid's informants shared that, a fortnight after the FKA had named her Business Woman of the Year, her company had finally made her EVP. Corporations can be shamed by irony?

As it happens The Blob has tribbed Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the first elected female head of state. That Sprakki ᛋᛒᚱᛅᚴᚴᛁ was elected in 1980 and was re-elected as President 3 subsequent times. Setting a precedent for what women could do and what a whole country could do about gender equality. That election was the cake that had been baking for five years since the 1975 Women's Work Stoppage, which forced everyone to see that changing diapers, gutting fish, telling at banks, typing letters was a) not much fun b) essential. Men referred to that day later as L o n g Friday.

You may not have the dedication to read through Secrets of the Sprakkar but you can catch a flavour of Eliza Reid's voice in a 06 May 2022 talk at Seattle's National Nordic Museum or on 09 May 2023 at the Montclair Literary Festival. It is a significant meta-point that on these two different occasions she is thriftily wearing the same dress - HeadOfState WAGs please copy.  Natch she done a TEDx: in whc she TMIs the initial blind-date. And look out for Eliza Reid's new murder-mystery. And Iceland still means Grindavík in my sources of anxiety.

I mentioned at the top that The President of Iceland is stepping down this Summer and elections are set for the Spring. What next for the retiring head of state? Here is one possibility: hooking up with his twin brother separated at birth to do a two-hander called Some Geezer fed my Geyser: an investigation into the state of Icelandic gastronomy presented by Guðni Rosenthal and Phil Jóhannesson: