Iceland's Deserts

 "There's a difference between a natural desert and a manmade desert," Magnus said as we crossed an imaginary line in the sand on our way to the hot spring area Landmannalaugar.

I've long loved Iceland for its contrasts. Not just the clash of ice and fire that everyone remarks upon, but the juxtaposition of jewel-green fields and jagged black lava, of fertile horse pastures and sand-blasted wastelands. But after a day spent with Magnús Jóhannsson, the botanist who runs Mudshark Adventure Tours [see www.mudshark.is] out of Hella, in Iceland's south, I realized my perception of Iceland's beauty was rather romantic--and more than a little bit skewed.

I've known Magnús and his wife, Anna María Ágústsdóttir, since before they earned their Ph.D.s at Penn State some years ago. I've visited them several times in Iceland and heard about their work at Landgræslan ríkisins, Iceland's soil conservation service.

Apparently, I wasn't paying attention.

Twice in the 1990s, while they were still in school, I rode on horseback from a farm near Hella around the volcano Hekla to the hotspring area at Landmannalaugar. Once we had six days of driving rain (read about that trip here: 2/29/12). The second trip I got badly sunburned and rode like Jesse James with a bandanna tied around my nose and mouth to filter out the suffocating dust.

I'd always assumed the deserts of blowing black sand I'd ridden across were inescapable--a constantly fought, constantly to-be-reckoned-with natural hazard of this volcanically active land. They're not. In many places, Magnus pointed out, as we drove a similar route to Landmannalaugar in the Mudshark Land Rover, these deserts are manmade. They are both preventable and capable of being restored to a healthy green.

True, volcanic eruptions do periodically blanket some areas in ash. But the ash doesn't necessarily kill off the vegetation, I learned from reading a scientific paper Anna María recently published in the journal Natural Hazards [get link]. Only if the area is already under stress--from overgrazing, usually--is the ashfall catastrophic. A healthy ecosystem can bounce back.

Our tour began in the town of Hella, where one of Magnús and Anna María's neighbors keeps a garden of apple trees (a curiosity in Iceland). We passed the headquarters of the soil conservation service on a road bordered by tall imported trees. Fields of barley and rapeseed rippled in the wind (quite uncommon in Iceland, where the only reliable crop for generations has been hay). A demonstration forest hugged a small hill.

When we entered the desert I had ridden through in the 1990s, I was surprised to see islands of native birch had established themselves. In other places, the soil conservation service had seeded acres of black sand with Alaskan lupine, a nitrogen-fixing legume, to enrich the soil, and with native lyme grass, to stabilize the dunes.

We passed a waterfall I knew well from my rides, Troll Woman's Leap. I had a picture on my office wall back home of our horse herd resting at that very spot: Black sand spread from the riverbanks in every direction, our many-colored herd looking bright in contrast. Now the place was transformed with grass and flowers.

Then we crossed through a gate in a fence, and the vegetation disappeared. The black sand deserts I'd ridden through reappeared. We'd left the soil conservation area, and entered a section of the highlands where sheep were allowed to graze. We saw a ewe and two lambs here and there. Nothing you could call a "flock," just the rare family of animals. Yet it was enough to suppress regrowth. These were the manmade deserts Magnús had referred to.

At some point (was there a gate? I don't recall) we transitioned smoothly into the natural desert: We had reached the highlands, where snow and cold defeat all but the alpine flowers (blooming in lush profusion in sheltered spots) and the hardy moss, which did its best to soften the jagged lumps of lava.

Like the many tourists we met at Landmannalaugar, we marveled at the vast range of color in the rocks, at the astonishing sulfur vents reeking of rotten egg, at the steam rising from the river, and at the stark beauty of the bleak, lake-filled landscape in Iceland's harsh interior.

When the first settlers came to Iceland in the ninth century, scientists have determined, birch woodlands covered 25% of the island. The settlers cut the trees to make charcoal. They burned the scrubby forests to clear land for planting. They introduced grazing animals--horses, cows, sheep, goats, and pigs--which kept the forests from regenerating. The winds ate at the edges of the overgrazed fields, and the volcanoes did their part, periodically coating the landscape with ash. Over centuries, the stresses accumulated: cutting, burning, grazing, wind erosion, ash fall...

The story of Iceland's desertification is well told at the soil conservation service's new museum, Sagnagardur [see their website at http://land.is/2847-2/], just east of Hella, where these two photos were taken. The bottom one shows a surprisingly large piece of petrified wood found in Iceland.

The museum tells, too, the new story of re-greening the land. Now Iceland's forested area is a little over 1% of the country--and growing steadily.

Anyone like me who is enthralled by Iceland's beauty, and who wonders why it looks the way it does, should spend an instructive hour at Sagnagardur. Better yet, take Magnús's Mudshark Ecosystems tour [see http://www.mudshark.is/ecosystems-and-restoration.html] or, like I did, his Landmannalaugar tour [http://www.mudshark.is/Super-jeep-private-tours-Landmannalaugar.html]

The Greening of Iceland

This week at an American Geophysical Union conference in Iceland, my friend Anna Maria Agustsdottir gave a talk on the importance of planting trees in Iceland to repair the damage caused by volcanic eruptions. (See news coverage here.) It’s a project she and her husband, Magnus Johannsson, have been working on for a long time at Iceland’s Landgræðslan ríkisins, or Soil Conservation Service. In 2000, I went out in the field with Anna and Magnus, in the shadow of the volcano Hekla, to report on their work for the alumni magazine of Penn State University. 

Here’s an excerpt from that story: Comparing it to the AGU report, you can see that Anna and Magnus and their colleagues have accomplished a lot in ten years. 

After an hour of bouncing us down a dusty road in his high-powered SUV, Magnus swerves over the berm and inches across the lava plain, over black sand and large rocks blasted there by the volcano Hekla, that snow-capped eminence over our left shoulders that people in the Middle Ages knew as the Mouth of Hell. I’m taking the grand tour of the research plots of Iceland’s Soil Conservation Service with Magnus, his wife Anna, and their children, five-year-old Sara and infant Snorri. The same tour, Magnus says, that he gave to Deng Xiao-Ping’s granddaughter the week before. For his Ph.D. at Penn State, Magnus spent his summers growing zucchini and testing the viability of its seeds. Anna’s dissertation was on volcanoes. Back home in Iceland, they have a much harder row to hoe: growing grass—or anything—to stop the blowing sand.

There’s nothing for miles here, it seems, but black sand and snowy peaks. Volcanoes erupt frequently. An earthquake registering 6.5 on the Richter scale struck the week before I came. According to Kristin Vogfjord, another Penn State alumna and the earthquake specialist at Iceland’s National Weather Service, the epicenter of the quake was just where Magnus is trying to grow grass. His fields lie atop a major fault, where two tectonic plates beneath the continents are pulling apart. On an average day, the area is shaken by 20 to 30 tiny quakes; today there are 3,000. One of Kristin’s colleagues, monitoring the fault, registers the movements each night. Said Kristin, “It’s almost as if you can see the tectonic plates moving in her data.” The earthquakes are often precursors to eruptions. In the last 20 years, Mount Hekla has erupted three times, coating the ground each time with six inches or more of rubbly, sandy black pumice.

Yet Magnus is undeterred. “We’re fixing the land,” he exclaims, waving a hand out the car window.

Far in the distance I see specks of color against the vast expanse of gray. It’s a small cadre of workers, among them Magnus’s 16-year-old brother. As we park and walk toward them, I begin to laugh. Each of the teens has a flat of lupine seedlings, spindly plants about four inches tall. Each also has a potato planter: like a coffee can on a stick. They’re spending the summer trudging back and forth across the black sand plain, six steps, plant a lupine, six steps, plant a lupine. Today the midges are thick. The teens wear face nets, but Magnus and I are fanning our hands like crazy. The kids and Anna have stayed in the car. Six steps, plant a lupine. It’s like the summer job from hell.

Magnus sees the humor, but he’s still miffed that I’m laughing. “In a reclamation project you want your lupine,” he insists. A spire of blue or purple or rose-colored flowers, lupine is a legume; it takes nitrogen out of the air and fixes it in the soil, making its own fertilizer. “We’re creating dunes by planting melgresi—Icelandic lyme grass—perpendicular to the direction of the drifting sand,” Magnus continues, “but we need to use fertilizer year after year for three years to get it to grow. Legumes are the answer to this. We’ve tried native Icelandic species such as white clover or sea pea, but they’re not as vigorous as lupine.”

We drive a little closer to the volcano, and now, indeed, I see that the peculiar Icelandic persistence is paying off: The sands have taken on a tinge of green. They were sown and fertilized four months before Hekla erupted last February [2000], and now the grass shoots are poking up through the new lava and ash. “Ashfall is not a problem in heavily vegetated areas,” Magnus says, “but here we get pumice blowing and drifting like snow. That’s quite a different matter.” Only the native lyme grass and a new Alaskan import, Bering hair grass, can stand having sand blown over them. “They just push up through it.”

When the first Viking settlers arrived in Iceland in 874, the medieval Icelandic sagas say, the land was green “from the mountains to the sea.” Birch woodlands blanketed at least 25 percent of the country; they now cover only 1 percent. Sites of old farmsteads, once grassy and full of sheep, are now black sand deserts. Nearly 40 percent of the country is threatened by desertification. The cause of the problem, Magnus says, is a mix of volcanic action, wind, weather, and human activity.

Icelanders can’t control the first three, so they’re working on the fourth: reducing the grazing herds and planting trees. As one Soil Conservation Service brochure puts it, “The Icelanders still owe their country more than half of the original vegetation cover.”

I like the way they put that: Icelanders owe their country. It’s a lesson other nations need to learn as well. From South Africa to northern China, desertification directly affects some 250 million people, almost four percent of the world population, according to a news release from the United Nations Environment Program last June [2000]. The Icelanders’ experiment could set an example around the world.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.