I just wanted to give fair warning that I might sound like a babbling buffoon soon when giving directions, so I will as far as I can point to where it starts and towards a point it is heading.Īh, the Great North, it is a wonder in confusion. Just to describe how weird it is, there will soon be a part that has the heading of Nort-South-North. Trigonometry is from now on the best tool. This problem spills over to compasses going bonkers from here on, and even the GPS system is letting us down due to lack of coverage. We are now entering an area of the globe where maps go haywire, directions are no longer well suited to our usual spatial grid pairings, and unless you have a globe, or use Google Earth, things will become tricky to describe using North, East, South and West, all of it sort of breaks down into a general North. Here is where I need to talk about East/West and North/South.
As it nears Bear Island and more solid crust it then diverts towards the North again. Like all of the other parts, this is a volcanic oceanic spreading ridge, but otherwise, it is not the most intriguing of our features. The Arctic Mid Oceanic RidgeĪs we enter AMOR proper we encounter the Mohns Ridge that is moving Northeast towards Bear Island. As we leave Jan Mayen the speed has dropped to just below 2 centimetres per year. As we have travelled North the speed of the spreading have been slowing down as we jumped between the different parts as we travelled. There is just one thing we need to discuss first. Here is where we leave our beloved Mid Atlantic Rift Behind, it has served us well, but we need to get to know the amorous northern sister/extension now. Most of the micro-continent is moving eastwards away from Iceland, but the Nort western tip is welded to Greenland. Jan Mayen itself is a miniature of Iceland, with a WNW/ESE-trending part of the Mid Atlantic Ridge intersecting and spreading it, and a remnant of an old and most likely dying mantleplume, that may be the old Alpha Ridge-plume. But as a point source, it is the strongest force on Earth.Īs we pass the Tjörnes Fracture Zone we come to the Kolbeinsey Ridge that runs North and to the West of the Jan Mayen micro-continent until it meets the Jan Mayen Fracture Zone and diverts to the East.
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Or in other words, the “lumpiness” of Earth in Iceland, as evidenced by measurments from the GOCE satellite.Īs such it is the greatest known driver of tectonic change on the planet, besides the combined force of the Mid Atlantic Rift. The total uplift of Iceland is 3 000 metres, here I am talking about the uplift created by the negative gravitation anomaly caused by the lower density material in the Icelandic mantleplume. It is being uplifted by the mantleplume by about 54 metres, and it is spreading at a rate of 2.8 centimetres per year.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.įirst, it is time to take stock of where we start, Iceland is built by the interaction of a mantleplume and the spreading of the Mid Atlantic Rift.
The regional faults on the northern Mid Atlantic Rift. It is time to spread our scaled wings and start our journey to the North, and beyond. Isn’t that the tail of Níðhöggr that we see out there? Isn’t it the End of the World as we thought it would be that we see out there? So, let us at least mentally stand on the Northern Shores of the grandest expression of the Mid Atlantic Rift, Iceland, and let us look towards the North. The Mid Atlantic Rift, erroneously named as it will turn out, is a planet-scale scar running all the way from frozen Antarctica, up to the equally frozen Arctic reaches. The difference is just that it is not our world that is ending, it is the world of the future New Pangea that is ending up in the far North, and that the end has already begun quite some time ago. Turns out that science is indeed proving that we were right the entire time. I come from the North, and in our traditions and old religious motifs, we have always known that the end of the world comes from the North. Photograph tacken by Gernot Hecker, used under Wikimedia Commons.
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