Iceland’s use of exterior wood made it seem like a Scandinavian country.
Its limited ability to grow its own wood made it seem like an Arctic country.
I guess both of those make sense.
I might just as well have called this post “Public Whimsy,” because the bridges in question are nicknamed Squiggly and Squinty, and it’s the nicknames that have stuck. Gotta love Glaswegians . . .
Squinty
Iceland has lots of birds, but not what I would call lots of variety. I think that’s typical of northern climes. I’ve already showcased the common eider, which we saw in great numbers in many places.
Catching birds on the fly – mine and theirs, sometimes – isn’t conducive to phabulous photographs. It is, however, conducive to several chances at the same species, most of them new to me. So let’s just take a quick look, shall we? Continue reading
Water depth; sandbar movement; prevailing winds. These are not factors that I frequently consider in my day-to-day.
But even a smallish cruise ship must consider them, which is why we loaded onto a bus for a 2.5 hour trip to Iceland’s SE coast. Why not dock at a port nearer our destination? Turns out, we were docked at the nearest port.
And yet the undeniable pain of 5 hours on a bus is not what stands out in my memory from that day. But first, some background.
About 11% of Iceland’s land area is covered by ice:
269 named glaciers of almost all types
(ice caps, outlet glaciers, mountain glaciers,
alpine, piedmont and cirque glaciers, ice streams).
– Iceland Glaciers
As we trundled along the highway, the guide pointed out several glaciers, or tongues/outlets thereof. Our target? Breií°amerkurjí¶kull.
Say again?
Breií°amerkurjí¶kull (Icelandic pronunciation: “‹[ˈpreËií°aËŒmÉ›rÌ¥kÊrËŒjÅ“ËkÊtlÌ¥])
is an outlet glacier of the larger glacier of Vatnají¶kull in southeastern Iceland.
– Wiki
Now, I find four syllables to be sufficiently challenging in my own language, never mind in Icelandic, even with the supposed help of the pronunciation guide. So I’m good to go with the main glacier’s name, always remembering, naturally, to put the emphasis on the first syllable and treating the “j” as a “y.” VAT-na-yo-kull.
By far the largest of Iceland’s ice caps is Vatnajokull
with an area of 8,300 sq. km,
equal in size to all the glaciers on the European mainland put together –
or 3 times the size of Luxembourg or Rhode Island.
– Iceland Glaciers
Any Luxembourgians here? Didn’t think so. So how big is that in Canadian terms? These rough approximations will give you an idea:
Glacial moraine restricts the glacier’s melt-water from just running off into the ocean, instead channeling it into a narrow stream. The small lagoon formed at the glacier’s base hosts small icebergs that break off from the outlet glacier. Eventually, they melt enough to float down to the ocean, where they bob around in the surf for a while. That’s it without the poetry.
We started at the beach, which was ground-up black basalt, entirely reasonable in a country where every rock came out of a volcano at some point.
Then we moved across the highway to take an amphibious vehicle ride through the assembled congregation. The black lines in the bergs were from volcanic eruptions which had dumped ash onto the glacier, to be sandwiched between layers of snow.
It’s not my metier, but it seems to me it deserves some poetry.
It’s a palindromic number, which recommends it to me from the get-go. It’s also a prime number, although I checked with Google before pronouncing it so, my mental multiplication tables perhaps not being quite what they used to be.
I know about palindromes and primes. However, with 149, it’s also a member of a pair of twin primes. I did not know about twin primes.
It’s also other mathematical things that I did not know about, and still pretty much don’t even after reading the explanations:
Not sure how the sieves play in all this.
Well, baaad for me, really.
I don’t eat lamb. Maybe it’s the remembered woolly taste of mutton from my childhood home. As an adult, I’ve tried to be fair, sampling rack of lamb prepared by excellent American cooks, and organic New Zealand lamb prepared by excellent Canadian cooks.
You won’t even know it’s lamb.
Friday. A photographer friend urges me to join a camera club to get constructive criticism of my photographs, and offers his own time and expertise for that activity.
Saturday. Seth Godin’s blog arrives in my inbox:
Looking for validation . . .
. . . or perhaps, you’re looking to improve.
You can’t do both at the same time.
If it’s perfect, you can’t make it better.
But if you don’t make it better, you’re getting no closer to what you set out to accomplish.
Coincidence? Surely. The universe isn’t really all about me.
Timely? Yes, just as surely.
You can’t do both at the same time.
Every day I have to decide not just what to look at, but what to look for.
The Firth of Forth. It just sounds cool, doesn’t it? But it gets better.
In and near Edinburgh, three magnificent bridges cross the Firth:
However photogenic, singly or together, they’re more than just three lovely bridges. They represent evolving engineering capabilities across three centuries. Continue reading
The lecturer on Iceland: Past and Present talked briefly about whether Icelanders were descended from Vikings.
His position? It sorta depends on how you define “Viking”:
All right then, on to our next stop: the National Museum of Iceland.
And what’s this? Two analyses (DNA analysis of the human remains in ancient graves, and mitochondrial analysis of present-day Icelanders) show that about 80% of the original male colonists were from the Scandinavian countries.
And about 60% of the original female colonists were from the British Isles. Taken to Iceland, no doubt, by peaceable farmers.
Posted: 2025 Jun 13
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
This space is available for other submissions.
