Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

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We just spent some time in Iceland this past year. I hadn't really realized it but Iceland pretty much didn't even have a formal tourist industry until sometime in the early 2000s mostly due to volcanic eruptions disrupting transatlantic air traffic causing the country to end up on the news.

I came away with some interesting things:

- In one small town we visited they had turned the local town hall into a tourist greeting center. It had a theater that showed films from the 60s and 70s filmed near that town. One of them explained that there were no roads to the town until the modern period. However the town's main industry was sheep farming. How did they get the sheep to market in the larger towns? Simple, they flow in an aircraft, drove the sheep onboard, and flew them there! Before the airplane people either didn't live there or had to drive their sheep by foot or boat to market -- trips of many many days.

- Icelanders are incredibly comfortable being constantly very near volcanism. Most village centers have a local bathhouse fed by hot water from hot springs and they're very popular social centers, people live on the slopes of active volcanoes, the air often smells of volcanic gases in many places in the country, and so on.

- Much of the landscape is virtually impassable. It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape that was so inaccessible simply due to the terrain. In some areas, relatively "flat" landscapes were so rocky that I can't even imagine how one might traverse those.

Beautiful country, hearty people, expensive, surprisingly consistently good food.

> Much of the landscape is virtually impassable. It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape that was so inaccessible simply due to the terrain. In some areas, relatively "flat" landscapes were so rocky that I can't even imagine how one might traverse those.

There are certainly areas lacking in vegetation for natural reasons but much of the land is vegetatively sparse because the Vikings cut down all the trees:

> At the time of human settlement almost 1150 years ago, birch forest and woodland covered 25-40% of Iceland's land area

From: https://www.skogur.is/en/forestry/forestry-in-a-treeless-lan...

Which some are also trying to grow back:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/20/climate/icela...

A lot of the roughness in the terrain is because there are lots of old lava fields

...but not old enough to have weathered down. Iceland is made of lava, as is Hawaii, but the Hawaiian islands are much older* which is why they are now a garden paradise.

*Except the big island which is young enough to still have active volcanoes like Iceland.

What is it about being made of lava that makes Hawaii now a garden paradise?

"Volcanic soil" is good for growing plants, it's full of useful minerals

https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/why-is-volcanic-soil-so-fe...

Volanic soil can be poor in nitrogen and if there are no native nitrogen fixers, and or top soil erosion, then it will be hard for anything to grow.

That is why the alaskan lupin was introduced to Iceland, as it can grow in nitrogen poor volcanic soil to halt the erosion and do nitrogen fixation.

> It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape that was so inaccessible simply due to the terrain.

I haven't been to Iceland, but I got similar vibes the first time I hiked through the Kilauea East Rift zone (vegetatively sparse, nearly impassable), where it's perhaps even more stark since lush tropical forest is just a few miles away.

Until railways were built everywhere animals were all driven to market often over long distances. Hence "drove road".

That might have been an unintentionally funny point to make, as Iceland doesn't have any railways!

> It's the first time I've really ever seen such a vegetatively sparse landscape

The countryside of Iceland gave me the impression that instead of a "natural vegetated living world" there was two distinct things - an inorganic rock world, with a thin crust of life - lichen, moss and grass over it.

I mean, technically this is true everywhere; but in Iceland the vegetation was so thin and recent and patchy as to be noticeable in an unfamiliar way.

I truly felt in some areas, especially the South Coast, that we had accidentally driven off the continental shelf and ended up on the bottom of the sea.

A hot shower in Iceland always has a whiff of sulfur.

Not if the water is heat exchanged. There are two separate hot water systems in the capital and it differs between municipalities how the systems are.

When I made a 10-day car trip around a large part of Iceland some years ago, every single shower I used had that sulfur smell. I guess it's not impossible that the showers I used by sheer coincidence all used the same system. But isn't it also possible that even the water from the heat exchanger system contains some sulfur, in small enough amounts that locals get used to it and don't even smell it anymore, while foreigners still notice the smell.

Not only the showers have this smell: it's quite abundant all over the country. Every hot spring smells like that, and Iceland has quite a lot of those. I can easily imagine getting used to it after a few years living there, to the point that you simply don't smell small amounts anymore.

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