Trifter

Traveling to Iceland is like traveling into the past and into the future at the same time.  Iceland’s landscape, with its gurgling volcanoes, erupting geysers, and oozing hot springs, evokes the primordial origins of life.  Its Viking past feels close to the surface, with Icelanders speaking a language that is essentially the same as that spoken in medieval times.  Yet Iceland is also a nation full of highly literate and technologically sophisticated people who are prone to ingenuity–the geothermal steam that heats Iceland’s buildings, for example, is piped under the streets and sidewalks of Reykjavik, the capital city, to the keep them from icing up in the winter.  Iceland has also set itself up to be the world’s clean energy laboratory, vowing to become the first fossil-fuel-free economy.  Already, filling stations pump hydrogen for city buses and passenger vehicles equipped with hydrogen fuel-cell technology.  Even Iceland’s current economic crisis betrays its dual nature:  Iceland’s brash, and ultimately disastrous, storming of the 21st century global financial system required Viking audacity.