Tag: Glaciers

Foss, Ain, Ja, Vatn, Jökull, Sjó

In a moment of poetic rarity, I daftly said I would break my posts into the Elements of our being (Earth, fire, air, water and space), which means I am now stuck with the strange problem of writing my experiences around water in Iceland in one post.

Now do I tell you about how I bathed like a horse in Reykjavik, or how I much-muchly laid bare my ignorance of this beautiful Earth’s ecosystem as I lamented the cleaving of the iceberg, or how we were convinced an obstinate mermaid had come ashore the beach, and insisted on getting into people’s pictures the whole afternoon?

mermaid

I have to swim quickly past the Icelandic rivers and streams (Ain), gasp like a wasp at the thousands of waterfalls (Foss), warm myself in a sprint by geothermal spas, jump and shiver near glaciers (Jökull), watch a tidal wave sweep past me as I admire the seas (Sjó) and let my soaking in the rain (rigning) all just fleet past.

I can hear you mumble that now, no one feels refreshed by the post on the most sustaining of the poetic elements, and I agree.

I get a faint understanding of what these authors have to deal with when they go and promise a N- book series. Take the Harry Potter series for instance. J K Rowling must have had little choice but to get the books bigger and bigger because she had to fit everything in 7 books.

I now have to delegate all of the important things to be said about these things to the links below:
Did you know how 90% of Iceland’s energy needs are obtained from geothermal energy?

Did you know Icelandic glacial water is so fresh that you can drink it from source with little fear of contamination?

Well, you do now.

We were there in Iceland when Summer was beginning to show her beauty. Even so, more than half our days, there was rain. For a pluviophile, this was marvelous. Everywhere the eye could see, green carpets were rolled out for us to feast our eyes on.

The rain matched the tones of the children. Sometimes, the joyful pattering of the rain was like their perky tones of enthusiasm, the shuddering and heavy downpours were met with “Amma! Do you really want to hike like that? Get in now!”, and other times when the rain could not quite decide whether to pour or drizzle, the heart was torn whether to go out or stay in the car. These moments of cloudic indecision were the best and I danced and pranced in the rain, while the children adopted a distinct “I don’t know this crazy woman!” stance.

There were waterfalls of every kind and very soon, we stopped pointing them out to one another. We quietly enjoyed the weeping wails of the fjords, as much as the roaring riptides of the beach, and almost as much as the gleaming turquoise blue of the glacial ice pack. Water, in any form, is mesmerizing, tantalizing, energizing and therapeutic.

Well, I suppose I shall at least have to write about bathing in Iceland after all this larking about.

Rain, rivers and glaciers

California found itself in the eye of a storm. The storm has been pounding the daylight out of the state with no restraint. When I say daylight out of the state, I mean it. A quick walk at noon requires flashlights, raincoats and squashy boots.

Umbrellas that hitherto held their spokes up high now cower under the wrath of the skies.

A helpful illustration to drive home the point

This is the second umbrella of mine to suffer this fate. Umbrella sales have been brisk. Stores did not have time to run new price tags raising the price, and resorted to sticking ridiculous prices using scrap paper and licking the back of it for glue.

The rain water has become fast rivers and paper boats meet terrible fates. One tends to stop and muse about fast flowing rivers and slow flowing rivers and hardly flowing rivers. So, what does the world give to innocent ponderings such as this. The kind that could someday change the premise of the World? This.

The world has been mistakenly led to believe that all the glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035.

Himalayan Glaciers Vanish
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece

Bopa Uncle and Kreeta Aunty were enjoying the morning sun-rise from their porch house in Darjeeling. Bopa uncle always wanted to impress Kreeta Aunty and randomly pulled studies from his imagination with numbers that appealed to him. He went a bit overboard with the sun glinting and blurted out a bit dramatically perhaps, “By 2035, you take my word, by 2035, all the glaciers in the Himalayas will be gone.”

Kreeta Aunty did what was expected of her and gasped. Little did Bopa Uncle know that his jaunty boast would make it to the Times. So, while the angry skies have been trashing umbrellas and swaying trees, the world finds out that the whole thing about glaciers in the Himalayas was a fib all along.

Sigh!