User blog:BlooKaboom/Ridonculous Race to Name the Place: Iceland

"Get your passports ready, Fresh fans because we’re onto the next stop on ‘The Ridonculous Race To Name The Place!’ Each week we’re revealing a background shot from The Ridonculous Race and challenging all of you to guess where the scene takes place before revealing the answer. Want to find out the race’s itinerary before anybody else or just prove your geographical mastery? Then let’s get ridonculous, people! This week’s answer… Iceland! Each week we’re also dishing out some fun facts about the location, but in the case of Iceland the challenge was picking which trivia to share. How about 11% of Iceland is covered in glacial ice but it also has around two hundred volcanoes and a third of the lava flows on the entire planet?! That’s a whole lot of hot and cold to pack into an island that’s just over 100,000 km2! All of that heat and rushing water means that roughly 85% of Iceland’s electricity and heating comes from hydroelectric power and geothermal water. Talk about green! The Icelandic flag also represents those opposites coming together, with red for the country’s volcanoes, white for its ice and snow and blue for the water surrounding the island!

The reason for all of those volcanoes is Iceland’s location on the ridge between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. The island is actually fairly new — geologically speaking, anyway! That leads to other cool weirdness like the only land mammal to live in Iceland before humans showed up was the Arctic fox!

Such an interesting place seems to make for some pretty interesting residents, too, and Icelanders have plenty to say about it! Iceland has the most book and magazine publications per person in the world: about a tenth of the population will publish a book at some point in their lifetimes! So what’s cooler, glaciers or volcanoes? What would you write a book about? Let us know in the comments section below and keep an eye out for the next location in ‘The Ridonculous Race To Name The Place!’ Stay fresh, Brendan"

Thoughts?

Link: http://www.freshtvinc.com/blog/ridonculous-race-to-name-the-place-iceland/