Legend has it that Ingólfur Arnarson, the first Nordic Icelander, ripped the Öndvegissúlur (seat pillars) off of his longship in 874 AD and threw them into the sea to allow the gods to show him where to settle. Three years later, Ingólfur’s slaves found the pillars washed ashore in a bay hazy with geothermal steam. Ingólfur named his settlement Reykjavik, smoky bay in Icelandic, in recognition of the locale.
The steam that made the bay smoky drifted down from geothermal springs later named Laugarnar (The Pools for the washing pools). Back in the day, there was a path to the pools from (a much smaller) Reykjavik named Laugavegur (path to the pools) that the women used to carry the laundry to. The postcard above, circa 1910, show people at the geothermal pools washing clothes (as well as “the smoke” from the springs).
Around 1928, Reykjavik decided that it wanted to tap into its local geothermal resources for heating and hot water. Accordingly, they drilled wells in and around the springs as a source. Soon after, the hot springs began to fail. For a time, the city ran a pipe to the springs to provide hot water for washing. Originally, these wells flowed at the land surface with pressures 60 to 70 meters above land surface. However, as the pressure in the geothermal aquifer declined, the city began pumping water from the wells. Today, water levels in the geothermal aquifer are 50 meters below land surface. The hot springs have been gone for nearly 100 years.
I was in Reykjavik (to see gusgus play their COVID-delayed 25th anniversary shows) when I received reviews from the first draft of the book I wrote on groundwater sustainability. The editors really wanted a chapter of international case studies, something I was struggling to get motivated about since the time it would take to get up to speed on these case studies would be formidable. However, I came up with the idea of writing about the places I loved, regardless if I knew they had any groundwater management issues. And since I was in Iceland, I decided to poetically (or at least geographically) start my research on Iceland! On the flight home, I read about the plight of Reykjavik’s hot springs and arghh’d at the sky that I not learned about them soon enough to go see them (or least the ghost of them). However, due to a desire to see the total solar eclipse, I found myself back in Reykjavik this year with a day in Reykjavik to visit the springs (among other things such as cats and street art).
Amazingly, the spring site still exists in much the same form as shown in the postcard above. The stonework, the washing racks, and the foundation of the building shown in the postcard above still exist as does another washing rack and another building. As we walked from downtown Reykjavik, we stumbled upon a mural depicting women washing clothes in the building. In honor of the site and the women who used it, there is a statue of a woman washing clothes in a basin. The site also had nice interpretive panels in both Icelandic with English summaries (even though, for some unfathomable reason, these dried up springs do not pull busloads of tourists).
The first shocker was how close to the springs the initial hot water wells were drilled to the springs: literally spitting distance from the wash basins. Drilling wells is expensive, so the city placed the wells at the springs because they knew there was hot water there (it was literally bubbling out of the ground!). If they had known anything about hydrogeology, they would not have placed so many wells in such close proximity to the springs or to each other. The springs were doomed regardless, but their wells would have been interfering with each other thus requiring more and more wells to achieve the same production levels. Eventually they figured that out. Reykjavik still pulls water from the aquifer in this area, but I did not see any active wells in the spring area.
Oh! And why do I have “Reyklausvik” in the title? That means (I think…) non-smoky bay (so the title means smoky bay to non-smoky bay). Ha!
so secret, occult, and concealed 