Iceland does not feel like changing scenery - it is like changing planet. Going for a week off road in Iceland’s South is a good thing to do, while on my construction site the house foundation went through the finish line. April is a little to late for a good chance to see Northern lights. But Iceland has a lot to offer: glaciers, volcanos, waterfalls, geysers and all you need to push a 4x4 to the limit. Equipped with a 2022 version of the Suzuki Jimny. This car is like a gecko. It goes up everything. With a curb weight of just above a ton, crossing rivers it has a bit of a handicap though. But with anything else, this is a perfect car to go quite extreme. And that’s what Iceland is - extreme.

Driving around the whole island in a week, is a little too much behind the wheel. That’s why I focused on South Iceland, took more stops. Walking towards the glacier lagoons gave me the opportunity to see the effects of climate change and to recall my University lectures in glaciology. From the most recent end moraine you walk around to 2 km to the lagoon. Then it’s another 500 - 800 meters to the glacier itself. This looks like the retreat of ice in the last about 100 years. And that’s a lot. I have seen similar scales in New Zealand a few years ago - maybe even more. I do appreciate all the effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But it does look to me, that we better also start to also prepare coping with what’s coming anyways. And then there is the whole field of climate engineering, which I studied quite intensively during my PhD time. I am pretty sure, that the whole topic of global warming is too serious to keep it to the hippies trying to fix it by drinking oat milk and soy beans. And anyway the concept is known at least since I started studying in 1986. It’s a little late for voodoo, right?

The last two days I spent in Reykjavik to give the trip an urban ending and troll around with humpback whales and dolphins in the Reykjavik Bay, which was fun.