The Blue Lagoon was trashed the day a fellow artist went swimming. Floating solo cups. Drunk couples making out in milky blue water, taking selfies.
“Effluent water from the Svartsengi Power Plant is used to create a warm lagoon of heavenly blue colour, set in a rough black lava field,” writes Ari Trausti Guðmundsson, describing the Blue Lagoon and its properties.
Effluent, “an outflowing” often of “waste material (such as smoke, liquid industrial refuse, or sewage) discharged into the environment” as defined by Merriam-Webster.
The Krafla Power Station, a geothermal plant near lake Mývatn, feeds the famous Mývatn Nature Baths with water the color of melted club cocktails.
The Selárdalur Pool, unassuming, small and rectangular, located on the shores of the Selá river, a popular river for salmon angling.
Krauma spa, modern and slate black beside fat bright tubes hissing steam piped from the nearby Deildartunguhver hot spring.
Deildartunguhver singlehandedly generates the water used for heating the towns of Borgarnes and Akranes.
Between April 14th and May 23rd 2010, Eyjafjallajökull erupted, grounding 100,000 flights. The eruption created such dense sky ash because the stratovolcano lies underneath a glacier. [1]
Physical geology researchers at the University of Iceland Department of Earth Sciences study glaciology as related to ice dynamics and climate change. Researchers observe and record the decline in the extent and volume of glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice. [2]
In Skagaströnd, in north Iceland, during the ice age, glaciers eroded volcano craters carving rough stone sea cliffs, revealing volcano vents.
Iceland is a continental ecotone. Glaciers and volcanoes, overlapping.
Lakes in Iceland can scald you, cold to touch but riddled with hot springs along the base.
Swimming is deeply rooted in Icelandic culture because there are many pools. Almost every village has at least one year-round geothermal swimming pool.
George P. Mitchell was early to apply the process of fracking to shales to extract oil. Fracking, hydraulic fracturing, creates “frack fluid” which has been associated with drinking water contamination in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Ohio, and Wyoming. [3]
The Boundary Waters is newly open for sulfide mining, which produces toxic waste and could devastate the water quality in the region. [4]
Near Williston, North Dakota, homeowners have lit flames under their kitchen taps as a consequence of fracking in the region, gasses and chemicals released into home water pipes. [5]
“Some people ruin it for all of us,” the artist at the residency said, of her fellow Blue Lagoon-goers, littering solo cups. I picture water without anyone in it, all milk-blue lit with red.
I live near the Shoreham Yards Roundhouse, a historic landmark built in 1887. It was once a hub for the Sault Ste. Marie and Atlantic Railroad Companies. The Roundhouse is now vacant. A few years back, some fixed-gear bikers wanted to take it over, but they couldn’t develop it owed to ongoing pollution clean-up efforts. Shoreham is a site of legacy pollution, the Roundhouse a bullseye marking extensive soil and groundwater pollution. [6]
Iceland is geologically porous owed to volcanic activity and tectonic shifts. Tectonic shifts open the earth. Steam and water rise to groundwater, rise to the surface.
From Ari Trausti Guðmundsson I learn 70 percent of Iceland’s energy is culled from domestic sources, hydro- and geothermal. Hot water from drill-holes feeds pools. Geothermal energy production isn’t pollution free, releasing volcanic gasses, but it’s renewable.
Iceland’s effluent spa water is good for psoriasis and treating other skin disorders.
Near the Krafla Power Station there’s a shower and sink in the middle of a lava field that constantly runs water. Story goes, someone at the power plant tapped a drill-hole and outfitted the little bathroom as a joke.
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Notes
Works I’m indebted to in the research of this post include various sources footnoted throughout as well as Living Earth: Outline the Geology of Iceland by Ari Trausti Guðmundsson. Quoted excerpts are from chapter 9: The Subterranean Powerhouse, p. 329-359. Some of the lines here are direct quotes from sources footnoted. I consider this brief essay a found poem of sorts.
[1] Facts culled from Volcano House promotional bookmarker with facts about Eyjafjallajökull. www.volcanohouse.is
[2] Facts culled from an information flyer about the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland Masters Programme in Earth Science.
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/news/the-lives-they-lived/2013/12/21/george-mitchell/; https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/issues/fracking/environmental-impacts-water/
[4] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/09/06/boundary-waters-mining
[5] Gasland directed by Josh Fox, 2010.
[6] https://www.pca.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/g-27-11.pdf; http://www.minneapolismn.gov/cped/projects/cped_shoreham_yards; http://www.journalmpls.com/news/development/2016/08/velodrome-proposal-still-alive-for-shoreham-yards/