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Mid-Atlantic Ridge and adjacent plates. Volcanoes indicated in red.. In geological terms, Iceland is a young island. It started to form in the Miocene era about 20 million years ago from a series of volcanic eruptions on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where it lies between the North American Plate and Eurasian Plate.
This is a timeline of Icelandic history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Iceland and its predecessor states. To read about the background to these events, see history of Iceland .
Iceland [e] is a Nordic island country between the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between North America and Europe.It is culturally and politically linked with Europe and is the region's westernmost and most sparsely populated country. [12]
It is at the junction of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Greenland–Iceland–Faeroe Ridge. [18] It is one of five volcanic systems found in the axial rift zone in north east Iceland. [132] (Part of the North volcanic zone (NVZ)) circa 500 BC - Hverfjall (Hverfell) is a tephra cone or Phreatomagmatic eruption in northern Iceland.
The history of the Icelandic language began in the 9th century when the settlement of Iceland, mostly by Norwegians, brought a dialect of Old Norse to the island. The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100, the oldest single text being Íslendingabók followed by Landnámabók .
The Icelandic independence movement (Icelandic: Sjálfstæðisbarátta Íslendinga) was the collective effort made by Icelanders to achieve self-determination and independence from the Kingdom of Denmark throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Iceland received a constitution and limited home rule in 1874.
The oldest known source which mentions the name "Iceland" is an eleventh-century rune carving from Gotland. There is a possible early mention of Iceland in the book De mensura orbis terrae by the Irish monk Dicuil, dating to 825. [9] Dicuil claimed to have met some monks who had lived on the island of Thule. They said that darkness reigned ...
Þingvellir (Icelandic: [ˈθiŋkˌvɛtlɪr̥] ⓘ, anglicised as Thingvellir [Note 1]) was the site of the Alþing, the annual parliament of Iceland from the year 930 until the last session held at Þingvellir in 1798. [2] Since 1881, the parliament has been located within Alþingishúsið in Reykjavík. [3]