Iceland’s emptiness is not so strange, really, when you look at what the land itself is like.

Iceland is of volcanic origin. It’s a large blob of magma welling out of the slowly widening rift between the North Atlantic and the European continental plates. And that’s not just history – they have active volcanos right now. The last period of significant activity was in the 1970s-80s; a new island popped up off the coast of Iceland in the 60s as a result of an underwater volcanic eruption. The last major eruption in the 1780s killed 80% of the sheep in the country, and ashes wrecked agriculture all across the land. Famine reduced the population to 38,000 and according to my book, Denmark actually considered evacuating all survivors, effectively abandoning the country. And in between major eruptions, of course, the volcanically active areas are full of bubbling mud pools, springs of boiling sulphurous water, and fumaroles of other noxious gases.

Much of Iceland therefore consists of volcanic rock. The mountains resulting from old, major eruptions look reasonably normal, covered with a thin layer of soil. In other places, lava has flown over the ground more recently and created lava fields, which are about as hospitable as they sound: fields of jagged black porous stone formations.

We saw a number of these (hard to avoid, really) of different ages. Fields created by the activity in the 1970s resemble common descriptions of Hell. The ground is covered with black lava mounds, with steaming cracks here and there. The ground has bright white and yellow patches of sulphurous deposits. Nothing grows there at all. A few hundred years later, vegetation starts taking hold, mostly mosses and lichens. There is still really no soil to speak of. Another few thousand years, and mosses are joined by tufts of grass and even some small and hardy flowering plants.

Even where the ground is covered with some soil and has more plant life, it is a struggle for anything to grow in Iceland. It isn’t as cold as you might think, based on its location just south of the Arctic circle, because the Gulf Stream brings mild and moist air. Nevertheless, summer is short and chilly, and sunlight weak. On mountainsides in the northwest, snow extended very far down – to about 600m from sea level, I would guess.

As there are few forests, there is no shelter from wind or rain, and soil erosion is a real problem. Some areas in the northeast get very little rain, which gets captured by the glaciers and mountains to the south and west. The ground, being porous and volcanic, doesn’t hold water very well, either, and volcanic ash is not particularly fertile. At best, there are thigh-high shrubs of arctic birch and willow, mixed with heather and possibly a few bilberry bushes. Much of the countryside is just empty brown moorland of dry grass. And the worst areas are simply dusty stony desert.

The only inhabited areas are the coastal lowlands, which tend to be somewhere between moorland and grassy meadows – barely fertile enough for sheep and horses, and doesn’t really support any farming.

According to our guide book, Iceland had extensive forests when the first Viking settlers turned up in the 9th century. Most were chopped down, either for timber or firewood, or to clear land for fields and pastures. What the settlers didn’t realise was that due to Iceland’s cold and dry climate, trees take a lot longer to grow than in Sweden or Norway. So what would have been a sustainable pace of felling back at home, ended up denuding the whole island.

Iceland now has a reforestation programme, and plantations of birch and pine were frequent. Many farmhouses in the middle of grassy mountains had a tight cluster of trees just around the house – often fenced in to protect the trees from sheep. They have also introduced lupins to control erosion and fertilise the earth. In many places, clumps of blue lupins covered large areas and stood out as the only plants taller than a few centimetres.


Lava field after 300 years – Leirhnjukur


Lava field after 4000 years – Berserkahraun


Sulphur springs – Leirhnjukur


“Normal” landscape