Explain Why Iceland Exist

Why Iceland Exists
Iceland has an area of 103,000 kilometres square. This makes it the 18th largest island in the world. It is just south of the Arctic Circle. The Iceland hotspot and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge go right through Iceland. This is an essay about how tectonic activity and how it comes to form Iceland.
Location
Iceland is an island between the Greenland Sea and the Northern Atlantic Ocean, northwest of the United Kingdom Iceland is situated right in the North Atlantic Ocean. Iceland, positioned on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (A mid-ocean ridge is an underwater mountain range that is formed by plate tectonics) makes it vulnerable to volcanic eruptions and sometimes even earthquakes. The island is spilt by the North American plate and Eurasian plate. Iceland is also Europe’s westernmost country. Iceland gets the North Atlantic Current running by it so Iceland is kept at generally cold and damp temperatures. Iceland is the only land where the Mid-Atlantic ridge is running through it. This is why many geologists are so interested by its charismatic features.
Mid-Atlantic Ridge
Iceland was created because there are many volcanoes and this is what has caused Iceland to be made only 24 million years ago.
This is because of a huge underwater volcano. It was caused by volcanic magma erupting from the sea floor in the construction plate, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland has the greatest concentrations of volcanoes in the world. It has 130 volcanic mountains. Some of them are greater and more famous than the others. Most of them are situated on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge but some of them are on the fracture zones (Zones caused by pressure of the plates and are part of the constructive plate boundaries and destructive plate
boundaries).

In Heimaey in 1973, there was a volcanic eruption that happened on the 23rd January at 2-2.30am. People woke up to a strange sound and that was the eruption. The eruption was mount Eldfell erupting. When the volcano erupted it was the first eruption from the volcano in over 1000 years. The people around the volcano were worried because it meant that they would not be able to flee the area as the lava came out of the volcano very quickly. The volcano at Heimaey was a shield volcano, not a strato or composite cone volcano because you were able to see the lava coming out of the top of the volcano.

There are volcanoes on Iceland because it is a volcanic island. It was formed by a volcano, so it has volcanoes all around the island. These volcanoes heat up the hot water underneath Iceland, giving it the lovely hot baths and glacier spring that make so many people happy each year. The reason behind the rotten egg smell is that there is a lot of sulphur dissolved in the water from the lava underneath the surface of the earth. The volcanoes on Iceland are there for a reason and that reason is because Iceland is a volcanic island and still is attached to the volcano underneath it. This causes the lava to only be erupted when the large volcano underneath Iceland erupts.

At Thingvellir, many natural processes are happening. At Thingvellir there is a rift valley and that is the thing in the middle of a mid-ocean ridge. At Thingvellir there is a rift valley. A rift valley is linear-shaped lowland between highlands or mountain ranges created by the action of a geologic rift or fault. Here is a picture of the rift valley at Thingvellir.
Geysers are fountains of water and steam. They form when that steam builds up pressure underground and erupts at regular intervals. They are formed at regular intervals because that is when the steam wants to escape at. They are at regular intervals because they are at weaker points of the ice and it is a natural thing to be equidistant

A jokulhaup is a sudden flood of glacial meltwater released when volcanic activity heats the ice. The most recent one in Iceland was in 1996. It was a very big jokulhaup and this meant that it was a very dangerous thing. Jokulhaups are not very common and they can damage the environment greatly when they happen.