Iceland - on Simon Reeve's Scandinavia

A cross posting from my Fieldnotes from Iceland blog.

Simon Reeve's new series on Scandinavia has started on BBC2 and episodes are also on iPlayer.

The first one starts in Svalbard and heads over into Finland.

The second episode mostly takes place in Norway, and ends in northern Norway. He visits the place where the country's huge sovereign wealth fund - managing and investing the money from the oil industry - if only we'd had a sensible government that did the same.

This takes up the first two thirds of the programme.

From there, Simon heads over to Iceland.

• Land of fire and ice
• Smaller than England with a population the size of Leicester
• Not technically part of Scandinavia but with connections in its history and through language
• The motto of þetta reddast is explored - of the volcanic activity "it had to land on someone's lifetime, and we are that lifetime".

Simon is accompanied by Helga Torfadottir, a vulcanologist, and he drives over a new road built over fresh lava flows near Grindavik, and then heads into the town of Grindavik, which has an uncertain future. Over 3000 people were evacuated.

He visits lavas from the Laki eruption of the 1780s - which affected global climate - and reminds viewers of 2010's air traffic closures.

He goes by skidoo up onto Myrdalsjokull - one of Iceland's 269 glaciers (apparently), which are all retreating due to climate change. It is 200 square miles in extent, but below the ice there is dramatic change happening and he goes into an ice cave where he finds ash from Katla (on top of which it sits) and which last erupted in 1918. The glacier is keeping the pressure in place, but if released the magma could emerge.

Sunny weather increases the rate of melting and the risk of such caves. One collapsed last summer resulting in the death of an American tourist, and a reevaluation of health and safety with regards to such visitor attractions (I presume this was also filmed last year).

He finishes by looking at positives: heat for homes and power. Cheap power is used to smelt aluminium (you will pass one at Straumsvik when travelling from the airport into Reykjavik) and also host data centres for internet services.

He also visits the Carbfix plant (see more about these in another recent post on the blog as it seems they are not really doing very much in terms of actually removing carbon dioxide from the air).

The scale of these efforts is very small, which Simon likens to being "like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon".