Hi!
Our plane (FI680) just landed in Keflavík Airport near Reykjavik. I'm exhausted. It's 11:45 PM in Seattle but here it is 6:45 in the morning. Our teacher advised us to sleep during the 7 hour flight , but no one did. Anyway we are going to drop our stuff off at a hotel in Reykjavik and then go to Þingvellir, a national park in Iceland 40 minutes away from here. It is the place where the North American plate diverges from the Eurasian plate. Here is a diagram of how a divergent boundary works:
Plates are pulled apart and molten rock from below comes up and cools at a ridge. This causes a lot of tectonic activity in the area. In fact, there is so much activity that Iceland's volcanoes erupt 1/3 of the global lava output. There very recently was an eruption in Eyjafjallajökull that shut down European air travel. Earthquake activity is also moderately high in Iceland. There were two earthquakes in Iceland in the past 30 years which were above magnitude 6. Anyway, I can't wait to get there. Apparently we will be able to see the place where the plates meet! Maybe I will be able to keep one foot on either plate!
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