Baer Art Center Iceland Day 20

A lot happens on this quiet little island.  Vedur.is shows regular swarms of seismic activity and folks predict Katle who is long over due will be the next to erupt. She's on the south side of Iceland so we are safe here in Hofsos for now.  The Mid Atlantic Ridge runs through Iceland and is the only place in the world where you can stand on the ridge which divides the North American plate from the Eurasian plate. A likely place to be for a girl born on the San Andreas fault.

Our predators are the elegant swooping Terns who are keeping watch over their eggs which nest in low lying hay stacks and iceless polar bears who drift ashore. 

I started these two scroll paintings after recently viewing a film of the polar bear who drifted ashore on a glacier to Skagafjordur in 2008 not far from Hofsos. According to the Icelandic Institute of Natural History's Website 289 documented observations of polar bears have been recorded in Iceland.  On average there has been a sighting every other year since 1951.  Polar bear arrivals during the summer months are a recent phenomena for Iceland.

water color on rice paper 195 cm x 45 cm

water color on rice paper 195 cm x 45 cm

In this video Ignatius C. Rigor at the Universtiy of Washington, Seattle Applied Physics lab shows the changes in the extent of artcic sea ice from 1978 until 2008.