Circling Iceland for clues to our earthshaking geography

My goal was to pinpoint the spot where the Pacific Northwest's earthquakes and volcanoes come from.

Yes, I knew about the Juan de Fuca plate slipping under the westward-moving North American plate. But what was pushing the North American plate to the west?

I blamed Iceland — or, more precisely, the magma-oozing Mid-Atlantic Ridge, of which Iceland comprises the most conspicuous evidence. So I took a two-week tour with my sister around the island to investigate. (This was long before the country's economic meltdown.)

Water, water everywhere

The first day of our tour was spent on the "Golden Circle," the tourist circuit that everyone visits when he or she has only a day or two in Reykjavik. We saw the "greenhouse village" of Hveragerði, where hot springs supply heat to greenhouses that grow most of Iceland's flowers and produce. Here our guide, Jens, immediately proved his geothermal worth when he took us to a corner lot in a residential section of town that had nothing but a chasm with furiously boiling water at the bottom of it.

There used to be a house here, he said. One day the man of the house asked his wife why she had turned up the heat so high. She said she'd done no such thing, but she did agree that the living room's tile floor, beneath which geothermal heating pipes ran, was getting very warm indeed. They soon discovered that a new hot spring had erupted just beneath their home. So it had to be demolished. A neighboring bungalow still sat in its pretty garden 10 or 15 feet away, as if nothing much had happened.

The tour continued with a visit to nearby Geysir, from which all geysers take their name. But the highlight of the day was Þingvellir, the site where the first open-air Icelandic parliament, the Alþing, met in 930 A.D. The setting is a low, rugged canyon that serves as a natural amphitheater. (Iceland's parliament is still called the Alþing.)

Þingvellir is significant geologically as well as historically, for this is one of the places where the North American continental plate adjoins the Eurasian plate. The day was dark, the wind gusted and the rain blew horizontally as though it never would let up, so it seemed natural for there to be so many burbling brooks around. Jens, however, pointed out something unusual about these brooks: They ran at the bottom of sharp cracks in the rock, gaps only a foot or so wide but surprisingly deep.

It wasn't water erosion that created these canyons-in-miniature, Jens explained. Instead, the rock was splitting apart under pressure from below. We would see other similar fissures, some far more dramatic, throughout our trip.

Steaming up

The next day we found ourselves at Deildartunguhver, a hot springs complex in northwest Iceland, billed as the largest in Europe. (One of Iceland's more curious conceits is that it is somehow "in" Europe, even though it's much closer to Greenland than Norway.) A boiling stream tumbled over rocks, shooting up clouds of steam that instantly fogged my glasses. And where scalding water poured from the rocky stream into a gentler river, a farmer had planted a vegetable garden in the open air, the billowing steam apparently prolonging the growing season along the riverbank. The weather had warmed up. It was now in the mid-50s and sunny. But the river was still hot enough to let you trace its course down its shallow valley by following its steam clouds.

Two days later, in Akureyri — a charming town billed as Iceland's "second largest city" (population: 16,000) — we saw our first traffic lights since Reykjavik, and half an hour out of town we came across another warm-water river with faint steam rising from it. Once more we were near the continental-plate boundary. We were also approaching our farthest point north. With the midsummer solstice approaching, the sun dipped below the horizon for less than an hour, and it never got darker than bright twilight.

Bubbles and baths

Our hotel was near one of the most volcanically active parts of the island, and the next day we went to investigate it. We saw bubbling mud pools so stinky they made you gag. We strolled up another volcano, Krafla, and from its rim got a view of a sprawling geothermal power-plant system surrounding us. Scattered steam vents on the hillsides were capped and connected to pipelines that led to the central generating plant. The Krafla field erupted in 1975, and kept throwing up lava rivers into the 1980s, at one point encroaching within a mile of the power plant. There's a parking lot near the now-cooling lava field, and here you can follow a footpath among the still-scalding steam vents.

Fissures similar to those at Þingvellir lay between Krafla's crater and the steaming lava field, indicating the point where the Eurasian plate is pushed eastward and the North American plate is pushed westward by rising magma. The fissures were less than two feet wide, but you couldn't always see to the bottom of them.

In the afternoon, we clambered up another volcano, Hverfell, and from its rim saw much larger cracks in the earth, several yards wide in places, spreading across the plain to our north. Tucked into these were two warm-water grottos that had once served as hideaways for young men and women, properly segregated, to bathe in. There was supposed to be an underwater tunnel the boys had swum through to spy on the naked girls. But an earthquake had raised the water temperature to near-boiling point and ended the fun.

We finished the afternoon at the Mývatn Nature Baths, similar to the famous Blue Lagoon outside Reykjavik. And we had quite an interesting time getting there. Roadworkers were regrading the entry-drive, but they kept uncovering steam vents and having to improvise detours for the spa's clientele. Jens laughed as he turned first left and then right, following temporary signposts directing him away from roadbeds-in-progress that were billowing crazed white plumes of steam.

I began to picture Iceland as one vast experiment in percolation: an outsized, windswept, glacier-covered, superheated sponge.

Action under the ice

As we continued along the north coast two days later, we caught a glimpse of the island of Grimsey, a small gray chip on the horizon whose northern tip lies above the Arctic Circle. It made me wonder whether, when we got down to the south coast, I'd be able to see something that had fascinated me when I was 9 years old: Surtsey, the volcanic island that created itself from scratch in November 1963. If I could catch a glimpse of Surtsey, I felt, my trip would be complete.

Our next major stop was Skaftafell National Park, where the attractions include a craggy array of volcanoes and volcanic ridges, behind which loomed Vatnajökull, Iceland's largest ice field, which pours out between the mountains in the form of glaciers. The park, Iceland's answer to Yellowstone, is mostly an icy wilderness, but its solid-land areas are great hiking terrain, with paths that are meticulously marked and maintained. Climb down into the valleys and you can practically walk under the glaciers themselves.

Our final day on the road took us across the Skeiðarársandur, an immense expanse of glacial debris and quicksands created by buried melting icebergs. When winds whip up dust storms here, it must be hellish. On the calm and clouded day we saw it, it looked featureless and limbolike, simultaneously intimidating and dull.

Yet in 1996 it had been the scene of enormous drama. Floodwaters from the eruption of Grímsvötn (under the icecap) had swept away bridges, roadways and utility cables in a muddy torrent upon emerging from the southern edge of Vatnajökull. The tourist center at Skaftafell National Park offered repeat viewings of a film in which you could watch bridges being knocked off their piers.

All was quiet now, but as we crossed the long bridge over the Skeiðará River, it grew clear that any man-made structures on this inhospitable estuarial plain were here on a strictly provisional basis. Clearly Iceland's volcanism could be as much of a problem for itself as for us West Coasters.

A Surtsey sighting

Later that afternoon, in Vik — Iceland's southernmost town and its surfing capital (yes, Iceland has a surfing capital!) — I looked out to sea and grew desperate. Fog was coming in around the nearby headland. There went my chances of seeing Surtsey.

But I wasn't reckoning with the caprice of Icelandic weather. Twenty minutes after we left Vík, blue sky and long-distance views out to the southern ocean-horizon were restored to us. And there, not far offshore, were the abrupt shapes (rock loafs, high-rise saddles) of Vestmannaeyjar (the Westmann Islands, which had had some volcanic excitement of their own in 1973). Beyond them lay Surtsey, a sharp-ledged, uneven wafer rising from the sea. We kept it in sight for much of the remainder of the trip.

At the bustling town of Selfoss, we saw our first traffic lights since Akureyri. Ten minutes later we passed through Hveragerði, the "hot springs village" we had visited almost two weeks earlier.

Our circle was complete.

But I didn't much feel like blaming Iceland anymore. I just wanted to come back as soon as possible.