Renewed Activity of the Great Geyser

Abstract

T HERE are many other wells and becks also which are sometimes 1 flooded with water, shooting it out high into the air and covering everything near with foam. So wrote Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian, and it is not surprising that people in the thirteenth century knew of hot-water springs in Iceland which occasionally shot high into the air. The early colonists would have had many and varied experiences settling in the new land, and the hot springs must have impressed them greatly. The sagas rarely speak of natural phenomena, and when they do it is always soberly and briefly; but there are many accounts dating from the Middle Ages and later times, describing hot springs and sulphur pools; indeed, the latter often figure in mediaeval fables about Iceland. The volcanoes and sulphur pools were generally regarded as the gates of Hell. In pleasant contrast to all these fancies are the real Icelandic accounts of natural events, plain and devoid of the demon fantasies of European literature. Time after time learned Icelanders sought to dispel the ridiculous ideas cherished in Europe about their country, but it was only in the eighteenth century that they succeeded. Saxo's description of the hot springs is quite a correct one: without doubt he had his information from one who had seen them, presumably an Icelander; but we do not know if it applies to the Great Geyser itself. The first records of any hot spring in the region where the Geyser now is date from I294, in connection with a great earthquake and an eruption of Hekla. The name geyser was first used in i647 by the famous bishop of Skalholt, Brynjolfur Sveinsson, and according to that divine it erupted once every day. The number of hot springs in present-day Iceland is almost incredible: there are several thousand at least. As a rule they are found in large groups of from ten to a hundred, all close together. They occur in almost every part of the country, from the shore and the lowlands to high up on the fells and right up to the margin of the great ice-covered mountains, the so-called jokulls. Actually there are grounds for the belief that there are hot springs under the ice-cap, and at certain places on the sea bottom off the Icelandic coast. Certain glacial rivers have a smell of sulphur compounds. The activity of the hot springs varies from place to place. Large numbers of them are tepid, but many are boiling. Some boil steadily and constantly with a loud bubbling noise almost like a soup-kettle of giant dimensions, and large steam bubbles are forced up through the pipe and burst on the surface. Other hot springs have a decidedly rhythmic activity. Normally the hot water quietly wells up out of the pipe, not actually boiling; but at certain intervals boiling water and steam are ejected as if from a fountain. The most famous of all Iceland's springs of this kind is Stori Geysir, and in former days, before the hot springs of Yellowstone and in New Zealand were known, it was unique. When those in Yellowstone Park were found and described, they were compared with the Geyser and the term geyser was introduced for all springs of this kind. There is something extraordinarily attractive about the clean, pure, hot