Why do they have so many hot springs in Iceland?
If you lived in Iceland, chances are your school would have no heating bill. You would bathe in a pool of warm water all year round. And no one would pay to heat the water. The furnace that heats your home would need no stoking. Through the long winter nights and the long summer days the hot water would stay as hot as you wished. And all for free. You would eat bananas, figs and lettuce greens, all grown in hot houses kept warm without fuels.
For this strange island is provided with an endless supply of boiling water. It gushes up from the ground in countless hot springs. It breaks through the mountains and dashes down the slopes in steaming streams. And the people lead this wonderful hot water off into pipes to do all sorts o f jobs some of the pipes "run warm water to the farm dirt, helping to grow green crops.
The north of this wonderful island touches the Arctic Circle. Its southern shores are brushed by the warm Gulf Stream. Bitter gales strip it of tall trees. Few trees in Iceland grow taller than a. man. The summers are cool and the winters are mild. The jagged coastline tempts fish and fishermen. And farming is done in the coastal valleys.
The island gets its character from a crown of mountains and a bleak central plateau. Iceland has been called the land of fire and ice, it has plenty of both. Much of its central plateau is covered in fields of frozen snow the whole year long, The fire is in volcanoes. Iceland has over a hundred volcanoes, many of them are active.
From time to time the active volcanoes pour forth molten lava. The seething rock melts the ice and new streams gush down the slopes. But most of the time, the volcanoes just smolder forth plumes of smoke and steam from their tall slopes, heat and fiery remains buried deep underground. Below their cones, the volcanoes have roots far below the surface of the ground. There the seething lava. waits in tunnel cracks and crevices.
Down there too is groundwater. It trickles down from the frozen glaciers and snow fields above. This water comes in contact with the heat and seething rocks below. It is heated, boiled and sometimes burned to scalding steam in the roots of the volcanoes. Some of this water bursts forth in hot springs. Since the root of the volcano never cools, the Icelanders have their hot water all year round.
Some of the hot water is trapped in geysers. It spouts forth from time to time in great gushers. Iceland has countless geysers. The most famous is called the Geysira The name comes from an Icelandic word meaning to rush forth with fury. And this Geyser leads all the geysers in the world. It does not spit forth its plume of steam and boiling water as regularly as our Old Faithful. But when it does spit it sends its spray 200 feet into the air,