The Loneliest Quake on the Planet

The casualties of the earthquake lie face-down on the wet pavement outside Brynjolfur Gesson's garage, their red hats and white beards a mess of ceramic shards. Unlike his garden gnomes, Gesson wasn't home when the earthquake struck his home earlier in the afternoon, sending a wide crack up the wall of his kitchen, where broken plates, beer cans, and paper lie in a chaotic heap on the floor. As his neighbors cram mattresses and suitcases into cars as they head for the homes of relatives in nearby Reykjavik, Gesson can't say where he plans to go. "I don't know," he says, frustrated, and retreats back inside to survey the damage.

Although last week's quake near the small town of Selfloss registered 6.1 on the Richter scale, and was followed by over 100 small aftershocks that rattled windows and nerves late into the night and the following day, there were no serious injuries or major structural damages. Still, "Everybody was visibly shaken," says the town's police chief, Olafur Helgi Kjartansson. "We didn't have any clue that it was coming."

Iceland carefully monitors its seismic activity, as well it ought to, for this isolated nation of just over 300,000 makes its home on a piece of volcanic rock that is among the most unpredictable pieces of land on the planet. Above the Earth's crust, its cosmopolitan and wealthy population shops for Land Rovers and new condos, while beneath the ground, magma chambers churn, occasionally rising to the surface with varying degrees of destruction. Iceland straddles the mid-Atlantic ridge, where the Eurasian and North American plates are slowly drifting apart. Unlike locations where parts of the earth grind up against one another, the drifting apart of the plates means a lot of small quakes — but not usually the kind that dislodges wall radiators or send Scandinavian-modern shelf units flying across the room.

As shocked as they may have been by Thursday's quake, they were not unprepared. Minutes after the quake, police were on the streets ordering people to evacuate their homes in anticipation of an aftershock. They were quickly joined by hundreds of search-and-rescue volunteers, regularly called on for such varied emergency tasks as fetching tourists trapped in bad weather to pulling vehicles out of glacial crevasses.

A little over three hours after the quake, dozens of SAR volunteers in red fleeces, all-weather pants and hiking boots are gathered in a parking lot in Hveragerdi, waiting for orders from their command center. Emil Jonsson, an electrician by trade from a suburb of Reykjavik, got a call from his unit within 15 minutes of the tremor. He has already finished going through houses in the area to assess any damage. "The houses were okay, but everything inside had fallen," says Jonsson. "Now I'm waiting for another job."

Ten minutes along the road past the wide green fields of sheep farms, an orange tent stands alongside a mobile command center outside Selfloss' police headquarters. The street is lined with white SUVs rigged with thick antennae and monster tires, while dozens of uniformed police officers mill about drinking coffee and smoking. Police Chief Kjartansson surveys the disarray in his headquarters, littered with scattered papers and filing cabinets. "If somebody had been taking their passport picture an hour earlier, you can see what would have happened," he notes, pointing to the tall metal column that has fallen on the precise spot where people sit to be photographed. At the door of another office, a bookshelf has collapsed onto a chair. "If somebody had been sitting at that desk," he says, not finishing his sentence.

Modern Iceland has been remarkably lucky in the face of its unpredictable geography. Past centuries may have seen catastrophic natural disasters, but the worst in the nation's recent history was a series of avalanches in the 1990s that killed over 30 people. But if the hundreds of volunteers, the dozens of converted emergency 4x4s, the strategic maps and the shelter tents seem like overkill in response to the day's minor toll, they also reflect the fragility and communal sense of responsibility fostered by Iceland's isolation. Since the U.S. military pulled out in 2006, Icelanders take the manifestations of their isolation — whether it's a lack of fresh produce or facing the forces of nature without any immediate help — with a Nordic stiff upper lip. As evening approaches in Hveragerdi, a small town built on a geothermal field so active that geysers have been known to spontaneously sprout in people's backyards, two boys bounce a pair of basketballs past the squadron of SAR volunteers. Did they feel the quake? "Yeah!" says Thorarinn Fridricksson, dribbling his ball. "We ran outside. I was laughing."