Land of Fire and Wank

I went to Iceland a couple of weeks ago courtesy of the NBC Today show. They said that they were interested in the interaction between the volcanoes and the glaciers. Unfortunately, it turned out that all they really wanted was someone to say Iceland is the Land of Fire and Ice. When I got there and we went into the field, it became clear very quickly that the producer had no interest in geology whatsoever, and didn't seem particularly taken with reality, either. All she was really after was some monkey to sit in front of a smoking cone and spill out tour-brochure cliches.

When we got to the site, the producer asked 'Where is the volcano?'. This is the Mid Atlantic Ridge - everything is a volcano, but they don't really look like smoking cones. I sat on some lava and talked a bit about Iceland and volcanoes. Each time she asked me 'Why is Iceland the land of Fire and Ice?', I tried not to say it, because it is stupid, or to qualify it with 'Some people say that Iceland is the Land of Fire and Ice'.

Next, we went to Thingvellir, the site of the ancient parliament, which also has great views of across the valley where much of the spreading of Iceland is taking place, and where there are some impressive cracks in the ground. When I tried to explain that the the rifting took place across the whole valley floor and that much of it took place in a different part of Iceland, so that you couldn't point to a particular point and say that it was America while another was Europe, she complained that that was too subtle.

In the afternoon, I took them to see a volcano that had formed while buried beneath an ice sheet. They were truly spectacular deposits, with alien-looking bulbous pillow lavas erupted at the bottom of a lake within the ice, and layer upon layer of glassy, black gravel that would have been sprayed out through the water by the volcano. Horizons of angular blocks juttting from the steep gully walls recorded more powerful blasts. I explained all of this and related it to footage that they had of a similar eruption from 1996, all as I dutifully pretended to make GPS measurements from a receiver with no batteries and to collect samples that I didn't want so that they could get footage of a real-life geologist in the field. 'Excellent.' I thought, 'Subglacial volcanology for the masses.'

The Today show is morning television, like Richard and Judy or GMTV in the UK. The footage became part of a segment to provide background information to the Today Show's Ends of the Earth series, where they send their presenters to different part of the world to report on the dangers of climate change against a backdrop of iconic international landmarks. These are the kind of landmarks that are always the first to be destroyed by invading aliens in order to demonstrate that the invasion is affecting the whole world. For Iceland, they chose the tourist-tastic, and massively overrated, Blue Lagoon. The whole segment was less than 4 minutes long and turned out pretty much as I had expected.

You can watch it here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/27783463#27766304

Note that:
(a) They got me on film uttering those terrible words. Gutted.
(b) As I didn't say it, they just got the presenter to say that the Almannaja fissure was the boundary between Europe and America.
(c) The masses will have to remain uneducated about the wonders of subglacial volcanology for now.

Given the level of information that they wanted to present, I don't really feel that they got value for money from my £1700 flight ticket, but perhaps they have given the American daytime TV viewing public what they wanted. This producer has been making segments for the Today show for 15 years, so she must be delivering what the people want to see. It's just a shame that that clearly isn't science.