“The twenty-nine volcanoes […] have covered the island with vast tracts of lava, some of which are over a thousand square miles large. Earthquakes have upon occasion destroyed hundreds of farms and enormous fissures or clefts, running often for miles across the solid sheet of lava, and sulphur springs and lakes of boiling mud make travel from one part of the island to the next a somewhat complicated affair. […] And yet people not only live on Iceland but want to go on living there.”

Hendrik Villem van Loon, Van Loon’s Geography, 1932