Landscape Phot-o' the Day: A View from the Bridge Between Two Continents, near Keflavik, Icleand

This is one of my favorite landscape shots. This is the view from Iceland's Bridge Between Two Continents. This is a bridge over a gap in the landscape, formed because this is precisely where two tectonic plates are pulling apart. This is looking north, so the North American Plate is on the left and the Eurasian Plate is on the right. The plates here are pulling apart. The plates are pulling apart in the Atlantic, which means somewhere some plates must be banging into each other. So here the earthquakes are relatively minor. The strong earthquakes are over on the Pacific Ocean side, where the North American Plate either is sliding against the Pacific Plate (California) or banging against it (Alaska and Japan, where the earthquakes are even stronger than California).

The Bridge Between Two Continents is an actual foot bridge that whimsically calls attention to the science of plate tectonics. It is located somewhere in Southwestern Iceland, not all that far from Keflavik, the international airport serving Reykjavik, Iceland.