Grenjaðarstaður and Myvátn

On the fourth day of our trip to Iceland, we first visited the open-air museum of the Grenjaðarstaður peat farm.

The Grenjaðarstaður parish had been based at the peat farm since 1865.

A layer of peat on the rocks

Volcanic rock, peat from the surrounding area, and driftwood were used to build the farmstead. Most of the driftwood came from Siberia and took up to five years to reach this location.

Immediately to the left of the entrance to this housing complex is the so-called "Golden Room," which is furnished entirely in the style of the 19th-century bourgeoisie. The middle photo shows Pastor Benedikt Kristjánsson, who served here as pastor from 1876 to 1907. His wife, Regina Sívertssen, is pictured on the left. She died in 1884, and Benedikt married Ólöf Ásta, his second wife, pictured on the right.

Initially, cooking was done over an open fire. In the old peat-farmhouses, there was very little ventilation.

The women, who worked at the hearth from dawn to dusk, suffered from lung and eye diseases.

You will find a coffee pot just about anywhere in Iceland

So the modern stove came at just the right time. The women working here could occasionally look out the window and watch what was going on at the neighboring farm.

On the left: By moving the end panel, the bed width could be adjusted to suit individual needs.

Adjacent to the "kitchen" is the Pilthúsið, a room that served as both a sleeping and working area for the workers at Grenjaðarstaður.

On the other side of the corridor is Elísabet Jónsdóttir's room. She was the wife of Pastor Kristjansson's successor, Pastor Pétur Hjálmarsson. Elísabet was exceptionally musical. She was not only the parish organist and choir director, but also one of the first women to publish her compositions in Iceland. In her room, she taught not only music but also needlework.

In the farm's pantry, you admire a barrel used to store salted fish, as well as a butter churn.

The Grenjaðarstaðarkirkja stands in the churchyard. It was built of wood in 1865. The bells date from 1663 and 1740 and hang above the gateway.

The church's interior is kept simple.

Our next stop was the picturesque area around Lake Myvátn, which ranks among Iceland's most remarkable sights, particularly due to its volcanic features.

A basaltic eruption of the volcano Krafla 2300 years ago formed a natural dam, preventing accumulated water from draining away. It pooled into Myvátn, the Lake of Midges.

The midgets were many, annoying, and some of them biting. We bought mosquito nets to cover our heads.

©Wikipedia

The rift between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which we already met at Đingvellir, also runs through this region. The Myvátn area remains volcanically active.

 

The rift is widening. The midges rejoice: Iceland's land area is steadily growing.

**

The Great Drought of 1540

Hot and dry summers like the one we're experiencing now have occurred time and again, which is why the article "The Year-Long Unprecedented European Heat and Drought of 1540 - A Worst-Case Scenario," published in the journal Climatic Change, caught Red Baron's attention.

I tried to read the original article - especially since my late friend Iso is a co-author - but Springer Publishing has a paywall that can only be passed for €39.90.

In the article, 32 climate historians have painstakingly compiled, analyzed, and evaluated data from more than 300 chronicles, i.e., records kept by farmers, churches, and lock keepers, revealing Europe's great natural disaster.

It's a shame, but the price was too high. However, the European heat and drought wave of 1540 is well documented elsewhere, so I've compiled the information from those freely available sources.

The weather disaster of 1540 had already begun in 1539 in southern Europe but went unnoticed north of the Alps. In Spain, people had been holding processions to pray for rain since October. 

In Italy, the winter of 1539/40 was dry and warm "like July." Although the 16th century fell right in the middle of Europe's Little Ice Age, not a single drop of rain fell from October 1539 to early 1540, while people were rather sensitive to wet and cold summers.

North of the Alps, the millennium drought of 1540 began in the winter. As early as February, a high-pressure system formed over Europe, blocking the influence of the Atlantic and, in turn, the supply of moisture. Although a few storms still moved in, by April the continent was largely shielded from rain clouds.

For 26 weeks, no precipitation fell from France to Poland and from the Po Valley to northern Germany. From late June to early August, not a single drop cooled the brutal heat. An unprecedented 11-month-long Megadrought swept across Europe, including the British Isles.

The dried-up earth reflected even more heat into the atmosphere, feeding an unbearable heatwave. Temperatures were five to seven degrees above the high 20th-century levels. Reformer Martin Luther interpreted this as a sign of the end times. Officials ordered clergy in Germany, Italy, and England to beg God for forgiveness and pray for rain.

Hans Stolz, a winemaker from Guebwiller, Alsace, provided a detailed month-by-month account of the drought of 1540:

©Wikimedia

The year 1540. Although January of that year was unusually cold, February began warm and dry throughout; in March, it rained for three days, and on the first morning after that, there was frost; once the morning passed, the day became quite warm until the end of March; April was completely dry and arid, with no rain or snow falling until the end; May was completely dry and nice until the end; a quarter pound of grain was worth a pound of wine. June was completely dry at the beginning, but toward the end it rained occasionally, though not much, and there was plenty of hay; the month of June began to become terribly dry, and remained so until the end, so that such a dreadful water shortage began in this country that the people suffered great hunger due to the lack of grain, and the crops ...

Streams dried up and grew narrower and narrower. Even major rivers like the Elbe, Rhine, and Seine were so small that one could wade across without getting one's feet wet.

No water powered the mills to grind grain into flour: flour and bread prices skyrocketed.

The harvest withered, and most food was in short supply. With nowhere to pasture, cattle died of heat stroke and hunger, decimating Europe's dairy supply.

As early as the beginning of August, the trees were shedding their bone-dry leaves, as if it were already fall.

As if famine wasn't enough, Europeans were also chased from their homes by forest and structural fires. The dry ground caught fire, and forest and brush fires blazed across the countryside, creeping into the towns densely packed with half-timbered houses. There wasn't any water to put out the fire.

In Germany alone, 33 towns burned. The blaze of Einbeck reduced the entire town to ashes in a matter of hours, causing as many as 500 deaths. For weeks, gray smoke shrouded the continent, behind which the sun and moon nearly vanished as pale red glimmers.

Instead of water, God delivered wine - some of the best ever "created." The extreme heat meant that by the usual harvest time, grapes in Germany and France had dried almost to raisins. The resulting "late harvest" or Spätlese wine was deliciously sweet.

A "Kaiserwein" was harvested in Würzburg from a grape crop that had largely withered away and was pressed into specially crafted Prunkfässer (ceremonial barrels).

It was a stroke of luck; the 1540 Würzburg Stein is considered the oldest known single-vineyard wine and the invention of the Spätlese style.

The Millennium Wine of 1540 is in the middle bottle.

The last known bottle of this wine is kept at the Bürgerspital zum Heiligen Geist in Würzburg.

Most wells and springs lay barren. Those that still gave a little water were strictly guarded. In some regions, drinking wine was cheaper and safer than drinking water, since peasants were charged for well water, which was often contaminated by human waste.

Several hundred thousand people lost their lives because of dysentery, an intestinal infection that causes bloody diarrhea. It is thought that the death toll from disease had the greatest impact of all the miseries wrought by the 1540 drought. Estimates are that half a million Europeans succumbed to diseases, most after drinking tainted water.

With tens of thousands left unhoused, unemployed, and often diseased, local leaders quickly gave in to paranoia to explain the calamities. Authorities searched for scapegoats. At the time of the Reformation, they were found in religious opponents and climate refugees wandering around Germany.

Temperature anomaly in Freiburg for July and August 2026 (©BZ)

What about 2026? For weeks now, Red Baron has watched nature wither from exceptional dryness: the grass is yellow, the Dreisam is nearly dry, and the soil has turned to dust. More and more trees are dropping their leaves. Rivers like the Rhine have turned into trickles.

         In Freiburg, 2026 holds the longest streak of temperatures above 30 °C, and the summer is not over yet (©BZ)

Spring 2026 and the first half of summer rank among the driest ever recorded. The drought is comparable to the historic dry spells of 1976, 2003, and 2018. 

©Hadi/Wikipedia

Are we facing the threat of a millennium drought like in 1540? 

©Copernicus

The 2026 drought will probably not end in the summer. It will extend well into the fall, and rivers are likely to reach even lower levels in early fall than they are now.

Burning of witches (©Wikimedia)

The 16th-century drought and today's drought are similar in many ways, but back then, the blame wasn't placed on climate change - it was on witches. Hungry migrants were rounded up and tortured in hopes of eliciting confessions.

In 1540, for city fires, Martin Luther gave credence to fake news of a papal plot to incinerate Protestant towns.

In 2026, forest fires raging across Europe are being blamed on paranoid arsonists.

On Monday morning, I witnessed a rare weather phenomenon. I think they call it rain. People were dancing bareheaded, and dogs were sticking out their tongues to catch the precious drops.

It was too little, too late.

**

We're Having a Heat Dome

(©ZDF)

While in Europe in June 2019, we were suffering from a tropical heatwave; we are now smoldering under a tropical heat dome over Europe that has only slowly moved over the last five days.

When Ella sang "Gee her anatomy, made the mercury, jump to ninety three. Yes, sir!" today, the mercury didn't jump to 93 °F (34 °C), but at 6:18 PM it climbed to 36.9 °C (98.4 °F) on my shadowed terrace.

 
The temperature in my living room is 28.9 °C, which is tolerable because the relative humidity is only 50%. Despite the windows being closed, the CO₂ level remains within the green range due to the apartment's large volume.

When I wake up these days at 4 AM, I open the windows at opposite ends of my apartment wide to make a Durchzug (draught). This Querlüften (cross ventilation) improves air exchange.

At 7 AM, it's time to close the windows again because the outside temperature is approaching 30 °C.

©WP

On June 24, the heat dome lingered over France ...

©WP

 ... slowly sneaking into Central Europe and the British Isles by June 27.

©CNN

Temperature records were broken all over Europe

Charming weatherwoman Claire in "2050" (©WP)

In 2014, extrapolating from past data, Météo France predicted a hypothetical heat wave in August 2050. 

A shock. The hypothetical scenario happened 24 years earlier! (©WP)

There are still people who deny climate change and dismiss more frequent, longer heat waves as mere weather anomalies. However, scientists are concerned about the accelerating rise in temperature.

©WP

©WP

©WP

©NYT

Is this year's abnormal El Niño reaching out to Europe?

Unfortunately, the caricature has melted (©Mario Lars)

**

Doctor Atomic

The story of the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, is not necessarily a subject for an opera. And yet composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars dared to write and stage one about a scientific drama.

In fact, the opera has no dramatic plot; instead, it features many dialogues about scruples, ambition, fears about life, doubts, and the search for redemption. Doctor Atomic is the father of the atomic bomb, Robert J. Oppenheimer, who was not only a brilliant scientist but also well-educated in literature and philosophy.

Typical Oppenheimer with his hat and pipe (©SWF)

Robert earned his doctorate in theoretical physics at the age of 23 in Göttingen in 1923 under Max Born, who was full of praise for his student, who, in turn, recalls his time in Göttingen, “The work here is dizzying. You live in a state of constant mental excitement.” Indeed, “In those years, physics was not developed—it erupted, Born remembered.”

The opera begins in the style of a Greek tragedy with a choir dressed in black, which, however, does not sing darkly about fate, but informs the audience about some trivialities of physics.

We believed that
"Matter can be neither
created nor destroyed
but only altered in form.“

We believed that
”Energy can be neither
created nor destroyed
but only altered in form."

But now we know that
energy may become matter,
and now we know that
matter may become energy
and thus be altered in form.

Oppenheimer leans against a wooden frame
representing the temporary shanty town of Los Alamos (©Theater Freiburg).

The first aria, sung by the American Faust, reflects his unconscious confession, "I cannot stop this Trinity test. Someone or something must stop me."

"Batter my heart, three person'd God; For you
As yet, but knock, breathe, knock, breathe, knock, breathe
Shine, and seek to mend;
Batter my heart, three person'd God;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, break, blow, break, blow, burn, and make me new.*
*The text is borrowed from John Donne's “Holy Sonnet XIV.”

Robert, without his attributes, pipe, and hat, is grilling his steak (©Theater Freiburg)

There is no God in Doctor Atomic. Only mechanisms, deadlines, and momentum, and on-stage glowing grills with lots of meat and a pile of beercans.

With the help of beer cans, Edward Teller ponders
the most effective arrangement of uranium blocks to achieve a critical mass (©Theater Freiburg).

The countdown is imminent. Hope comes from Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, and her fictional Native American housemaid, Pasqualita. While Kitty invokes in vain her all-encompassing love as a counterforce, Pasqualita is stylized as a high priestess of reconciliation with divine nature.

The second act starts with a refrain sung by Pasqualita. The text is taken from a traditional Tewa lullaby song, and subsequent reiterations repeat the text with the direction changed to west, east, and south:

In the north, the cloud-flower blossoms
And now the lightning flashes
And now the thunder clashes
And now the rain comes down!
A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.

Indeed, the rain threatens to delay the test explosion.

Even though the ignition and explosion of the atomic bomb would have made for a spectacular musical apotheosis of the opera, Adams deliberately refrains from this expected and thus trivial end. Instead, he composed an extended orchestral countdown with a multitude of ticking or striking clocks, unnaturally stretching time.

In the composer's own words: "When the countdown finally comes into view, time slows down on stage. The characters lose themselves in their own visions and fantasies. The closer the moment of detonation approaches, the more time and space begin to blur."

"I wrestled for months with the question of how to treat the explosion. I finally decided on an extended orchestral countdown, a palette of clock sounds, some ticking, others hammering like pile drivers, each at its own tempo. Underneath this clock polyphony lies a bloodcurdling roar from loudspeakers."

©Theater Freiburg

"I created this sound from a sampled drum roll, which I played in an endless loop and processed with heavy sound filtering. At the climax, I added a cluster of recorded baby cries that cuts through the theater space like a sound meter, tearing through the darkness. As the roar subsides, all that remains is a light shower of clock strike fragments played by harp, celesta, and tuned gongs."

"As they fade away quietly, we hear the voice of a Japanese woman. She repeats sentences from Hiroshima survivors that I found in John Hersey's famous report on the immediate aftermath: 'I can't find my husband,' and, speaking to her little boy, Kasuo, 'come here.' 'Mr. Tanimoto, please, help us.' 'Please, can we have some water?'"

©Theater Freiburg

The bones of the summoned dead later end up in a mill. Oppenheimer grinds them to dust and sprinkles them over the model of the skeleton house during the countdown.

The first atomic bomb detonated on July 16 in the Jornada del Muerto (The Path of the Dead) desert in the US state of New Mexico: “We knew the world would never be the same again. A few people laughed, others cried, but most were simply silent,” Oppenheimer later recalled. He, the father of the atomic bomb, quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, “If the brilliance of a thousand suns were to explode in the sky at once, it would be like the brilliance of the Almighty.” “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

©IMAGO/Pond5 Images

Contributors to the Manhattan Project, Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer in a white hat and General Leslie Groves, in uniform, at the detonation site of the Trinity atomic bomb test. On the right edge of the photo is Robert Wilson, later the director of Fermilab near Chicago, where Red Baron met him.

In his lifetime, Oppenheimer did not regret his leadership of the Manhattan Project, but rather said, “Our work has changed the conditions of human life, but what happens with these changes is the problem of governments, not scientists.”

And so Max Born rightly laments, “Science has given man tremendous power, but no guidance on how to use it.”

**

Spectacular Pink

Yesterday evening, Red Baron observed a rare meteorological phenomenon.

While I expected a red-orange sunset, the sky was pink.

Look at the photo of a "classical" sunset by a friend of mine, the gifted Photographer Margit Anhut. An orange glow over the Vosges Mountains as seen from Schauinsland, the fourth-highest mountain in the Black Forest. Note the fog in the valleys.

As the sun sets, its light travels through a thicker atmospheric layer than when it shines from the zenith.  As a physicist, I have learned that, by Raleigh scattering, short-wavelength blue and violet light is scattered out of view. Therefore, the less scattered, longer red and orange wavelengths dominate the sky.

Now, high-altitude thin and wispy cirrus clouds enter the game. These clouds are ideal for reflecting the last rays of red and orange sunlight, particularly when the sun is below the horizon. Thus, the red light is diluted and mixes with the residual blue, making the sky appear pink.

Was it more than an incident that the very evening Red Baron listened at Freiburg’s Konzerthaus to the London Symphony Orchestra playing Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, the soloist Arabella Steinbacher wore a spectacular pink dress?

However, this is nothing compared to the dress Arabella wears on her website.

**

Tomorrow‘s Forests?

I still recall an Umweltgespräch (environmental discussion) in Freiburg that addressed droughts and heavy rainfall. The predictions made by the speaker six years ago have essentially come true.

That's why I was fascinated when I read about two evening lectures in the series Umweltgespräche, focusing on the forests of tomorrow.

German forests have always fascinated me. In 2015, I blogged about the severe damage to forests in Germany's Mittelgebirge (medium high mountain regions), such as the Harz Mountains.

In 2020, I revisited the topic of Waldsterben. The beginning of the coronavirus pandemic was a challenging year for people, but particularly devastating for German forests.

Finally, in 2023, I learned that not only do forests surrounding a city mitigate the local climate, but individual trees within the city can also reduce heat spots.

That's why I was excited about the two lectures, whose content was contrasting and therefore made for a fascinating evening. 

Prof. Jürgen Bauhus, Chair of Silviculture at the University of Freiburg, played the skeptic and demonstrated in his lecture, "Wald im Wandel, Wandel in den Köpfen (Forest in Transition, Transition in Minds)," that the topic of forests is much more complex and multifaceted than I had previously assumed.

In contrast, Ms. Nicole Schmalfuß, head of the Freiburg Municipal Forestry Office, took a pragmatic and practical approach to the subject in her presentation "Stadt - Wald - Vielfalt (City - Forest - Diversity)."

Freiburg's Environmental Mayor, Christine Buchheit, welcomed those present and pointed out that tonight's lectures would be attended not only by Freiburg citizens, but also by participants in a specialist workshop entitled "Wald neu denken (Rethinking the Forest)" taking place in Freiburg this week.

The evening's moderator, Prof. Heiner Schanz (left), introduced Prof. Bauhus as the first speaker. The latter emphasized the balancing act he had to perform to satisfy both the citizens and the experts present with his lecture.

He then complained about the small projection screen, as the hall was overflowing with people. Many listeners had to stand in the back, where they could probably only see splashes of color. Red Baron had arrived early, managed to get a seat in the third row, and was just able to read the slides. Nevertheless, the quality of my shots of the screen you will see in the following leaves much to be desired.

Here are a few points that stood out to me and were new to me.

Prof. Bauhus presented the research approach of the Cluster of Excellence on Future Forests in Freiburg.

Feedback on risks and potential adaptation options for forests, as well as their impacts on future forest decision-making, is incorporated into forest research. These two inputs can be used to develop transformation pathways for future socio-ecological forest systems.

The drivers of change include extreme events, disturbances, interactions, targeted environmental changes, system shifts, tipping points, and societal changes. Their predictability is limited. Here are examples:

According to the German Climate Protection Act, greenhouse gas emissions (essentially carbon dioxide and methane) in the land-use ecosystem are to be reduced by 25 million tons by 2030. However, after three consecutive dry summers between 2018 and 2020, so many trees died in the low mountain ranges that the balance was ruined, and only a saving of around 1 million tons of greenhouse gases is expected by 2030.

The planting of late-flowering black cherry trees (Prunus serotina) in the Netherlands was a complete misjudgement. The species forms dense stands and suppresses the regeneration of native trees (e.g., oak or beech). Prunus serotina's leaf litter changes the soil chemistry and hinders the growth of other plants. Between 1965 and 2018, this American import spread so rapidly that to date €500 million has been spent on combating it. 

Therefore, plans and decisions on climate protection can only be made against a backdrop of great uncertainty. In the above graphic, the lower blue ecological system state will be reached when no action is taken. Although planned remedy activities point in the right direction, they are not very targeted.

Changes in forests also require changes in society, or environmental changes generally go hand in hand with social changes.

On the one hand, forests have the capacity to provide a range of ecosystem services. On the other hand, society relies on the services this ecosystem provides. The resilience of these socio-economic factors is crucial, so risks must be mitigated through adaptation and overcome through transformations.

Results of studies show that locally adapted tree species are not always the best choice for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, changing tree species alone does not preserve the carbon sink properties of forests either. The best approach is flexible regeneration of adapted tree species, coupled with controlled changes in their composition. A suitable selection will maintain the CO₂ balance and can even improve it.

The future utilization potential of trees can be derived from forest utilization between 2012 and 2022. This results in an 18% decrease for spruce, a 43% increase for pine, a 160% increase for oak, and a 178% increase for beech in the years up to 2037.

The second speaker of the evening was the lively Ms. Schmalfuß.

She showed that forests cover 42% of the 6,509 hectares of the city of Freiburg. The small image illustrates the drought index in Germany for the year 2024. It shows that the moisture situation in the far southwest of Germany is quite different from that in the east (indicated by the brown areas).

Here are the predictions of future droughts made in 2019.

Freiburg boasts a diverse range of forests, from mossy to mountainous, and everything in between.

Ms. Schmalfuß presented the Freiburg Forest Convention of 2020. The city forest is preserved and managed in a way that ensures and promotes all four forest functions - protection, utilization, recreation, and climate mitigation - equally.

The objectives are:

1. Permanent preservation of the city forest
2. Preservation and promotion of biodiversity and other protective functions
3. Stability through diversity
4. Sustainable timber production
5. Increased use of timber in construction (buried  CO₂)

6. Preservation and promotion of the climate protection performance of the city forest
7. Preservation and further development of the recreational function of the city forest
8. Forest and environmental education in the city forest
9. The city forest as a workplace: occupational safety and training quality
10. The Freiburg city forest as an object of research, teaching, and study

The city forest (light green) is primarily a multifunctional commercial forest. Blue areas are forests with a prominent recreational function. Purple areas are extensive and maintenance areas, while dark red areas denote decommissioned forest areas.

The equal importance of the various functions does not mean that the same goals should be pursued everywhere since the diversity of forests requires differentiation.

Forests with a long history of forestry have great potential for biotope protection. Forests with high growth rates have great potential for climate protection. Forests with high-quality wood have significant potential for commercial use, while those located near cities have substantial potential for recreational purposes.

The concepts and instruments for implementing the Freiburg Forest Convention are:

1. Systematic management control, i.e., forest management with interim reviews and annual planning
2. FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certification
3. Near-natural forestry and the forest development type guideline
4. Long-term adaptation to climate change
5. Old and dead wood concept
6. Biodiversity action plan
7. Integration of management planning in Natura 2000 areas*
8. Regulated hunting
9. Information and guidance for forest visitors through attractive infrastructure offerings and a forest recreation map
10. Forest education in the city forest as a contribution to education for sustainable development and inclusion - offerings by the Forestry Office and Waldhaus Freiburg

*European animal and plant species protected areas

The slide on the planned management of forest facility renewal within the 10-year plan of the updated Freiburg Forest Convention was simply not legible.

Tomorrow's forests? Ms. Schmalfuß ended her lecture with an optimistic outlook:

Still forests tomorrow!

**