Joe and Françoise's excellent adventures!: The power of volcanoes.

Yesterday evening, we left the very north of Iceland, and sailed along the west coast to the very south of it, the small volcanic island of Heimaey. It’s a long way to go - so it took all night and morning. Which gave us a relaxing morning (all this wonderful sight seeing is exhausting!). So we slept in a bit. I took a “walk” on the treadmill where I was again rewarded by the visit of whales- this time a large pod of killer whales (did not manage to take pictures).

The sun and fog had been fighting all morning - as we arrived in port, the fog lifted enough for us to see the dramatic rocks of this double island (although not enough to see the top of the volcano). It is the only inhabited island in the Vestmann archipelago, with a population of about 5000.

The rocks that mark the entrance of the harbor are beautiful and dramatic, but make the narrow harbor tricky for a ship of our size. It took all of our captain’s skills to position us carefully along the dock! Not only is the harbor very narrow, but it is also full of large fishing ships going in an out for extra challenge! It is Iceland most important fishing center.

What makes this island most interesting is the large volcanic explosion that almost completely destroyed it in 1973. In the middle of the night in January 1973, the Heigafell volcano started sending huge flames, ash and lava. The town is basically built on its side and the danger to the 5000 people who lived there was extreme. In an odd bit of luck, there had been a storm the day before and all the fishing boats were in the harbor. The government issued a complete evacuation order - sent a few planes for the sick and elderly and the entire population of the town evacuated by boat. Only about 200 refused to leave. No one died - which is miraculous.

The lava flow lasted 6 months. The harbor was threatened which was dire, because without it, the town has no industry. Extreme measures were taken to divert the lava flow- building huge cement barriers, which were soon overcome.

What worked at the end was pumping huge amounts of water from the sea to cool the lava enough that it stopped before it reached the harbor. Thus the town was saved - although many houses were buried by the lava flow and many more by ash. Little by little, people came back, rebuilt pretty little housea on the same volcano and the town has regained almost the entire population.

As some of the buried house were excavated, they decided to build a museum using the ruins as its core - reminiscent of Pompéi. (That’s were the pictures of the explosion come from- the museum - not Pompei....).

I took a hike to the top of the volcano, across the lava fields, where you can see the huge crater. As you walk up, there are markers of the streets that got buried and of the houses that were there. From the point of view below, we can look down on the town- the town that is buried below our feet used to be at the same level. We are standing on a lava bed about 200 feet tall!

The trail to the edge of the crater was very cool looking in this fog, which (almost) made up for the lack of view at the top. On good days, the view is supposed to be great…