Iceland

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              "text": "Visitors approach the Reykjanes Power Station, near Reykjavik, at the southwestern tip of Iceland. The actively volcanic Reykjanes Peninsula, or Reykjanesskagi, is a seemingly barren waste of dark lava fields, redeemed only by a profusion of curative hot springs and sulphur springs in its southern half.",
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              "text": "A wrecked bridge at the Gunnuhver geothermal field near the Reykjanes Geothermal Power Plant is a reminder of a vengeful female ghost that was laid to rest here. Only after Guðrún (nicknamed Gunn) was dropped into a fumarole, named Gunnuhver (Gunn’s Hot Spring) in her everlasting did she stop appearing in the shape of a draug, a powerful spectre, She is still said to be crouched underground. As it happens, many of Iceland’s geothermal fields have apparitions attached to them, waiting to bust out from their underground prisons.",
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              "text": "The Geysir Hot Springs Geothermal Area in Haukadalur in southwest Iceland is home to Stori-Geysir (Great Geyser) that is the origin of the word ‘geyser’ (literally, gusher). Geysir, which topped 60-80 metres in its heydays, is said to have begun spouting in 1294 CE following a string of earthquakes, but tapered off in the 1980s and is now more or less dormant. This photograph is of Strokkur (The Churn), 100 m south of Geysir, which reliably sends up a 20-30 metre column of boiling water every 10 minutes or so.",
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              "text": "A favourite Icelandic activity is just, well, sitting in hot water. The Laugardalslaug Geothermal Pool pictured here, Iceland’s largest pool, located near Reykjavik, has an Olympic-size indoor pool, an outdoor pool, four heitir pottar (hot pots) and a whirlpool, a steambath and an 86-metre waterslide. Volcanic water keeps the temperature at 29°C. Icelanders say that without the geothermal baths, the country’s social life would freeze to death.",
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              "text": "The Blue Lagoon geothermal spa is one of Iceland’s 600 hot springs. Few remember that the lagoon’s creation, in 1977, was entirely accidental: the Svartsengi geothermal power station began pumping out residual geothermal brine, unusable for heating, a hot pool formed and spread, locals saw it steaming and bubbling, and jumped in and found that it worked wonders on skin conditions. Thus, in the Icelandic spirit of ‘waste not, want not’, waste heat from the Svartsengi geothermal plant doesn’t exactly go waste.",
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              "text": "A tourist sloshes around wearing a facepack of silicon mud, which is de rigueur in the Blue Lagoon—it is kept in crates located strategically around the huge waterbody. The famed stunning blueness of the water in the lagoon comes not from its purity but from incoming light refracted from the overdose of silicon molecules.",
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              "text": "A man sprays insecticide in a geothermally-heated greenhouse in Hveragerði, located in the 112-sq km Hengill volcanic region. Iceland has an underlay of 26 high-temperature geothermal fields and more than 250 low-temperature areas. While a DIY geothermal heating of greenhouses began here in 1924, vegetables had long been grown in the naturally warm soil in much of Iceland. Today, more than 200,000 sq m of Iceland is greenhoused and run entirely with geothermal heat extraction.",
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              "text": "A volcanic rock in the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa seems to be playing host to unlikely vegetation, some of it, fed by silicon mud, flamboyantly cerise, some of it stripped of life by thermal overheating. Even Iceland’s seemingly horticulturally dead volcanic regions are replete with outcrops of plant life.",
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              "text": "One of Hveragerði’s vast greenhouses, which use geothermal energy to heat water in the circulatory pipes. Half of Iceland’s greenhoused area grows flowers for the domestic market, and the other half vegetables and fruit for both domestic consumption and export. Iceland’s greenhouses use geothermal energy both for heating and electrical lighting during the long polar nights.",
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              "text": "Uniquely ecosensitive though Iceland is, the environment is not self-repairing: geothermal heat extraction is not zero carbon emission—yet. The fact that Iceland’s denudation was engineered by rampant logging by early settlers to build houses means that, today, the environment here has to be handled gently. Processes at the geothermal power plants are designed for minimal environmental impact, and workers—such as here at the Svartsengi geothermal power plant—are trained to micromanage the supersensitive equipment.",
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              "text": "The Hellisheiði Geothermal Combined Heat and Power Plant, located 20 minutes’ drive from Reykjavik in Hengill in the southwest, is Iceland’s largest and the world’s second-largest geothermal power station. It is notable because it came up after globally unprecedented environmental assessment: its impact on Iceland’s fragile vegetation is minimal.",
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              "text": "Tourists emerge from the steaming pool at the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa. People exit from the hot springs with great reluctance. For many, the day begins with a tonic geothermal soak: early morning hot dips are the Icelandic version of early morning walks on the grass.",
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              "text": "The half-million visitors to the Blue Lagoon are attracted primarily by its curative promise. But few agree on what makes the waters work as a natural disinfection agent. Most visitors are not psoriasis patients; they come to use the silicon mud as a skin scrub.",
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              "text": "The Reykjanes Geothermal Power Plant is located at the southwestern tip of Iceland, at the very edge of the North Atlantic Ridge. The plant looks like a study in industrial Brutalism, but it fits the area, which is honeycombed with forbidding, black lava fields, lava tubes, rifts and hot springs.",
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              "text": "Svartsengi means ‘Black Meadow’ in Icelandic—it describes the black lava fields that surround the Svartsengi Geothermal Combined Heat and Power Plant in Keflavik, near the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik. Mineral-rich, curative, hot seawater exiting from the plant fills up the adjacent ‘Blue Lagoon’, a top-draw international tourist spa with impeccable hygiene and environmental ratings.",
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WHEN THE 9TH CENTURY Norseman, Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson, gave Iceland its name—‘Íslanð’ (or ‘Land of Ice’ in Old Norse)—it was only because he was grossly unprepared for its winter, which, at between 0°C and -10°C in the southern lowlands and around -25°C in the north, is about the same temperature drop between Gulmarg and Kargil town every winter.

But since Hrafna-Flóki’s animals died of his nonchalance (and general boozy merrymaking), he believed the ultima Thule—the land beyond “the borders of the known world”—to be worthless. His crew, though, saw it as a land of warmth; and, counterintuitive as it might sound, Iceland is indeed a clement country, kept snug today by one of its greatest natural resources: geothermal energy.

This virtually unlimited resource is why car parks, pavements and 40,000 square metres of streets in Reykjavik are heated through winter and part of summer, and the lights never switched off on the 40-km road between Reykjavik and the Keflavik International Airport during the polar nights in deep winter.

The fractured tectonic plate boundary that gives Iceland its 30 active volcanic systems—13 of which have erupted in known history, the most recent that of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010—also gives it its massive non-polluting geothermal reserves which heat 89 percent of its homes, provide 54 percent of its primary energy (as opposed to the fossil fuels that provide 83 percent of primary energy in the US), toast up 130 of its 160 swimming pools, its greenhouses and fish farms, and thaw the permafrost, which covers about 8,000 sq km of its land area and is the country’s main civil engineering impediment.

Geothermal energy utilisation is a tried-and-tested practice in Iceland: although baking the hverabrauth (‘hot spring bread’) and bathing in hot springs has an undated history, it was a farmer who, in 1907, first piped geothermal steam (from a hot spring to his house nearby, a practice that the Svartsengi Geothermal Combined Heat and Power Plant continues in its supply, through 27 km of insulated pipes, of 83°C water to 40,000—a fourth—of Reykjavik’s houses); in 1930, water from Laugardalur (‘Hot Spring Valley’) was piped three km to a primary school at Reykjavik (‘Smoky Bay’) to the west; the country’s first geothermal power plant, a tiny, one-steam turbine affair at Bjarnarflag in the north, began operating in 1969—which was serendipitous in that geothermal energy exploitation in Iceland got underway just before the world-changing oil crisis of the 1970s; today, Iceland has five geothermal power plants and is the leading exporter of geothermal expertise to the rest of the world.

And, still, the country is using only a fraction of the 67 terawatt-hours (TWh) of available geothermal energy—seven TWh (or seven trillion watts) per year against the 20-30 TWh/year feasible today.

Among those reportedly interested in Icelandic geothermal knowledge—aside from Germany and the Philippines, with its prodigious subterranean heat reserves and six geothermal power plants—are Microsoft and Google Energy LLC, which is seeking to contain the galloping multimillion-dollar cost of maintaining Google’s gigantic data centres.

Meanwhile, Iceland has discovered that the secret to keeping geothermal energy recyclable is to send the nonthermal water, leached of its heat, back to where it came from. Before this knowledge played spoilsport with Iceland’s famous hedonism, the effluence from the Svartsengi geothermal power plant, located at Keflavik, created the tourist hotspot known as ‘Blue Lagoon’, a 37-39°C, six million-litre spa rich in healing minerals from the underlying lava field.

All good though this sounds, Iceland still has one of the highest per head greenhouse gas emissions in Europe; blame it on Icelanders using more power per head than any country in the world, and importing fossil fuel to power their trawlers and 4X4 offroaders, which have enough torque to haul icebergs (or so Icelanders claim).

But the world’s redemption might lie in Iceland’s view of which road to take to the future; and heading it is an anti-climate change and geothermal evangelist—its president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who said, in 2008 (with an impressive guilelessness, considering that he said it in the US): “The fireball that sits within the Earth is a resource. We walk on it, we sleep on it, we work on it. The question is: How do we harness it?”