Surtsey
— — land that learned to be land.
Not only on a wall.
“The youngest island in the North Atlantic. It rose out of the sea in November 1963 and finished forming in June 1967, when the eruption finally stopped. Only a small Icelandic research team is allowed to land, and only briefly each summer. From the western cliffs of Heimaey on a clear morning, Surtsey reads as a low dark shape on the southern horizon, the colour of cooled basalt, alone on the water.
Surtsey, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Surtsey lies about 32 kilometres south of the Icelandic mainland, the southernmost point of the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago. It was born in a submarine eruption that broke the surface on 14 November 1963 and continued for three and a half years, ending in June 1967. At its peak the island covered 2.7 square kilometres; wind and surf have since worn it down to roughly 1.3. UNESCO inscribed Surtsey as a World Heritage Site in 2008, citing its value as a pristine record of how life takes hold on new volcanic land.
Access is closed to the public. A small Icelandic research team visits each summer to log the slow arrival of mosses, vascular plants, gulls and, more recently, breeding puffins. The first higher plant, a sea rocket, was recorded in 1965. By 2008 around sixty vascular species had taken hold. The point of the closure is to keep the colonisation record clean: no boot brings in a seed it shouldn't. From a passing boat the island looks unfinished, still settling into itself, the sea still working its edges.
The 1963 eruption was first noticed by the crew of the fishing boat Ísleifur II, who saw a column of smoke south of Geirfuglasker before dawn. The volcano was named for Surtr, the fire giant of Norse mythology, foretold to set the world alight at Ragnarök. Two smaller satellite islets, Syrtlingur and Jólnir, also surfaced during the eruption but both have since washed away. Only Surtsey, capped with a layer of palagonite tuff that hardens against the sea, has stayed.