In the autumn of 2024, my husband Russell and I along with two other couples who are longtime friends of ours, took a ring road tour of Iceland. Our wonderful tour guide was Harpa Osk Sigurdardottir and she was both fun and very knowledgeable. She explained how Iceland was formed due to its position of sitting on a large active volcanic mantle plume that is located on the mid-Atlantic Ridge that borders two large tectonic plates, the North American and Eurasian plates. The plates are slowly but steadily pulling apart, causing constant earthquakes and lava flows that create more Icelandic land mass.

 

Harpa sometimes made her point in entertaining ways. I remember wryly chuckling (or was it loudly groaning?) at one of her jokes: “What do Icelanders do when they are lost in the forest? They stand up!” Because of the active volcanic nature of the island, the relatively few trees that exist in Iceland are not huge and there certainly are no large, towering forests.

 

Even so, Iceland does have beautiful fall color, you just have to look lower down than you might normally expect. This painting is based upon a photo I took when we were visiting Thingvellir National Park, which sits in the rift valley between the spreading tectonic plates.