A theology of geology and biology

That title is a stretch, but Marida IS obsessed with geology and Terri WAS going to die if she Didn’t See Puffins. In the end, we both got our wish, and both outings had a touch of the metaphysical about them.

On our glacier outing, we had gotten a great tip from one of the locals (our guide, José from Madrid). Only two hours away from our next stop of Stuðlagil was one of the best places to observe Puffins in Iceland. So we drove up over snow-covered mountains and through glacial valleys to get to Borgafjörður Eystri, in the far northeast.

Puffins at Hafnarhólma

This time of year, some 10,000 pairs of Atlantic Puffins come to nest at a small island called Hafnarhólmi, near where the road ends at a cute little working harbor. You take a wooden walkway up to the top of the island, and you are right among the colony. You are surrounded by hundreds of hummocks and holes with puffins peeking out or waddling up solemnly to give you a quizzical stare.

Puffins are sea birds and Professor Google says they can dive to up to 60 meters in search of fish, using their wings as fins. What the good professor does not mention is that Puffins are Cute For Days.

Stuðlagil Canyon

At this point Terri took a day for R&R and Marida did a canyon hike. Stuðlagil’s claim to fame is its eponymous canyon. This was once a raging glacial river that scoured a deep channel through the hardened volcanic layers. Then a dam was built upstream, and the reduced river level revealed an astonishing array of basalt columns, standing vertically, lying horizontally, poking out end-on, and even curved. While Hawaiian lava is often of the air-filled ouchy pointy variety, in Iceland this is rare and most of the fissures release more fluid lava that coats everything in a thick layer of basalt. If it cools relatively slowly, it forms hexagonal columns that can be a hundred feet long. Iceland is covered in basalt columns, but these are bigger, better, and certainly more bizarre.