Continental Plates Drifting Apart
When I was in Iceland, one of the things I desperately wanted to see were the place where continental plates are drifting apart. I think (hope) most of you know what continental plates are. Just in case I write a short description.
There are seven large plates in the world, some of them being Africa, Europe, North America and so one. There are places where one ends and other starts, means these plates are drifting apart. On those exact places, you could see massive cracks inside the earth crust and these are the places where a majority of earth on ground volcanism is happening.
Today I'll show you one of this location. This is located in northern Iceland near the massive active volcano mountain Krafla( see the @steemitworldmap comment in the section the see the precise point of these photos). There you can see a pretty nice crack that goes all over Iceland.
On the photo below you can see me standing between them, right leg on the North American plate and left one on the Eurasian plate.
Yes, I know this photo is a little shit. I took a screenshot from the long Iceland video I captured.
Let's see some proper photos of the continental plates cave.
You can see steam rising from the crack. This is coming from naturally hot water found in the caves underneath.
These continental plates are drifting apart about 2 centimeters per year. It's actually crazy fast if you think about it.
I also wanted to go inside the cave. There was a sign that cave might collapse at any given moment and I'm fully responsible for my own doing in there. Im a daredevil and wanted to take this risk.
I didn't get to go far, there was hot water there. Some years back people went in there to even take a dip or swim and just relax but you can't really do that anymore. In a couple of recent years, the water temperature has risen too high to stay in there( all year around approx. 45 degrees Celsius ). The water there was bright blue and I was able to see to see the bottom that was about 4 meters deep.
I don't really like these photos because they turned out too noisy. There was total darkness and I had no other choice to turn the ISO really high with flash.
So, would you go inside the cave?
After watching the horror movie "The Descent", I would NEVER!
But, it really looks interesting. I read so many blog posts about Iceland but nobody really visited this site. Thanks for sharing.
Greetings from Cape Town :)
Greetings from Estonia! Yes, I visited many "off the grid" places there, so much beauty and awesomeness to discover on Iceland.
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Dear @greddyforce,
Your story attracted our attention and we would like to introduce our tag #archisteem that could provide you with some extra support. For your information, we are currently running the project – 1001 Places to Remember. Your content is a fit for the project and could be qualified for the 10 Steem reward biweekly contest.
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Yes, of course!
Awesome, thanks @greddyforce!