Natural History

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Inspired by “Places with Terrible WiFi" by J. Estanislao Lopez

There are only a few places precious enough to have terrible Wifi these days.  Most of these places feel like the literal end of the Earth, and evidently that is where we have to go these days just to get a little peace and quiet, put down these digital bricks that we carry around with us everywhere we go, even to the bathroom.  If we want to step away from the constant stream of alerts, pings, texts, headlines and other garbage that pours relentlessly through the pipe, we need to find a place with terrible WiFi.

Iceland is one of these places. The weather conditions are so harsh in Iceland that it takes thousands of years for moss to take hold on the rocks.  There’s a shocking abundance of water everywhere you look, but few trees will take root, and even fewer land mammals can thrive there.  Everything they eat needs to be flown in from someplace else, making it astronomically expensive. Nevertheless, visitors continue to arrive in droves, braving the hail and the freezing rain to snap a few selfies by the waterfalls.

The island doesn’t care about any of this – it’s still a work in progress. An island that sill exists in geologic time, the product of billions of years of fire and ice at war with one another, carving out a landscape that looks like it belongs on another planet. It’s a bleak landscape of lava rock vomited up by Mother Earth, and she is not about to stop any time soon. There are still more than 30 active volcanoes on Iceland belching gas and oozing molten rock. And all it would take is just one big purge to make history of all of us.

If we could visit the Museum of Natural History 200,000 years in the future, we would see that our current mass extinction isn’t such a big deal after all. Scientists are concerned about the rapid rate of receding glaciers, melting under the scalding sun.  But the island knows that this has happened dozens of times throughout the course of history, and it intends to continue melting and refreezing, melting and refreezing, for billions of years to come.  Looking through the lens of geologic time, it may even seem like a deep freeze is exactly what we need, and that it’s long overdue. Once everything freezes, we’ll be able to walk straight across a land bridge from the UK to the North Pole, and then right on down to Canada – no boat or airplane necessary.

Except we won’t be here anymore.  We’ll be replaced by deep-sea creatures that we don’t know the names of yet because they don’t yet exist.  Once the oceans become more acidic and all the shallow water sea creatures start to die off, the planet will once again be populated by fierce, cold-blooded monsters who are better suited to evolution than we ever were, and who will probably be better guests on the planet. If we could just hit “fast forward,” for a few hundred thousand years, we would see what an insignificant species we were.  If the entire 4 billion years of geologic time were compressed into one day, we existed for less than one second of that day.  Mother Earth will continue throwing up obsidian boulders for millions of years to come, with or without us.