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152 GUIDE TO ICELAND. by a subsidence,1 during the eruption, of a tract three to four miles in length between two deep parallel rifts, which run northward for several miles; and the lava stretches away southward farther than the eye can follow it, when one stands upon the level ground. The depth of the subsidence is greatest near the lava, from which the surface of the sunken tract slopes gradually up to the level of the Orcefi, the rifts decreasing in size as the depth of the subsidence becomes less. The lava now forms a bed trending from S.S.W. to N.N.E., varying greatly in breadth, and said to be over twenty miles in length. To judge from its appearance, a vast quantity, most intensely heated, must first have welled forth from a rift, in the rocky strata underlying the desert, running down the centre of the bed for nearly its whole length ; this, owing to the compara- tively level nature of the ground, spread freely westward and east- ward wherever slight depressions existed in the plain of the Orcefi. In places these arms cover tracts several square miles in extent. This first eruption of molten rock congealed into a rugged sheet, twelve to fifty feet in thickness, very clinker-like along its borders, which are fragments of the earlier cooled fringe of the molten flood that were borne onward by that behind. It is evident from the veritable chaos of huge masses of lava piled up in places down the centre of the bed, above the rift whence the lava issued, that eruption after eruption took place ; each lava-flow being congealed into a layer of rock, which, in its turn, was subsequently upheaved and shattered by a later outburst, in whose fiery embrace the huge jagged masses of the torn-up bed were borne along partly imbedded, and from which, now that the later of these molten floods are also solid rock, they project at all angles. These masses are also built up into several groups of rude cone-shaped craters having an altitude above the lava of from 100 to 200 feet. Owing to the erratic manner in which the lava has spread around and been piled up down the centre of the bed, it is not an easy matter to compute the cubic con- tents of the enormous mass of molten rock that here issued in 1875 ; but the author believes that he shall under- rather than over-estimate if he sets down its bulk at 31,000 of millions of cubic feet. The lava- 1 It is said by the people living around Myvatn, who scour the Orcefi every autumn in search of strayed sheep, that a similar subsidence is to be seen at the southern end of the lava-bed. The author cannot say whether this is the case or not, having only ridden southward along the lava for a distance of eight miles. He was told in 1878 that the rifts seen on each side of the northern end of the lava extended the whole length of the bed, but last year he discovered that this is not the case.
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Guide to Iceland

Year
1882
Language
English
Pages
216


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