Thingvellir (Þingvellir)

You know you are in one of the most beautiful places on the planet when your pictures look increasingly more terrible (terribler should so be a word) to you the longer you go without looking a them. No, seriously! I'm about to post a bunch of pictures of Thingvellir, the site of Iceland's first parliamentary gathering and the boundary where the North American and Eurasia tectonic plates diverge and I hate all of them. 

It's such a cool place! Essentially what you've got is this big rift valley where the sea floor is spreading--yes, the sea floor. Only above water. It's amazing! In fact, Iceland is one of two places in the world where we can see this kind of rifting, the other being the Great Rift Valley in Africa. In the above picture you can see that this is indeed a valley, and on the east you have the Almannagjá, which is the boundary of the North American plate. 

It's huge--it's just one big wall of basalt. On the other side of the valley lies Hrafnagjá, which is more or less the same thing only for the Eurasia plate. In between lie fissures, the result of faulting, etc. Some are filled with water from the nearby Lake Þingvallavatn:

It's just a spectacular area all around, rich with both Icelandic history and geologic history... A must see!

Gullfoss & Geysir

On the same trip as the sheep round-up I got to go to Gullfoss, or "Golden Falls," and Geysir.

Seriously, go look Gullfoss up on Wikipedia or Google Images (especially of those in the wintertime!!). My pictures do not do it ANY justice. It's a glacier waterfall, so the water is a murky color, for which it gets it's name from. There is also a story about a woman, Sigríður Tómasdóttir, walking all the way to Reykjavik in order to save this waterfall from being used to produce electricity like many of the other waterfalls in Iceland...

From here we went to Haukadalur, or the Golden Circle, where Geysir and Strokkur are located.

Geysir (from which the word "geyser" originates) has been extremely effected by tectonic activity over the years leading to periods when the watershed had to be manipulated by man-made ditches and soap for the geyser to erupt. Today, such efforts only happen on rare occasions and Geysir doesn't erupt. This is a natural process for any geyser--even the littlest of shifting can effect a geyser (or cause one), which makes them so important in studying earthquake prediction. Strokkur is the main attraction now in this particular geothermal spot as it erupts every 3-8 minutes. 

There are also several other smaller geysers and pools in the area...

Also... if they tell you not to climb around Geysir (in my defense, the ropes barely came to my shins) it's because of these guys:

Boiling mud pots. Yaaay! (More of these later!) But look... rocks... 

I like rocks.