What Iceland Taught Me About Living With Water
Nine days of geothermal heat, changing glaciers, and the systems people built around them
Sarin Singhal
6/22/2025
One afternoon in Iceland, we ate lunch at a geothermal tomato farm and later tried rye bread baked underground. I had come prepared to be impressed by volcanoes and glaciers. I hadn’t thought much about what living near all that heat might mean for something as ordinary as making lunch.
I was there with ten classmates through Lawrenceville’s Harkness Travel program. We had read the Völuspá before leaving, and our nine days connected Iceland’s sagas and history to the places we visited. Around Borgarnes, we followed stories we had encountered in our reading. At Þingvellir, we learned about the continental divide. There was plenty to take in without finding another subject to think about.
But I was already involved in water sampling back in New Jersey, so water tended to get my attention.
At first, that meant the obvious things: waterfalls, glaciers, steam coming out of the ground. As the trip went on, I became more interested in how people lived alongside them. The tomato farm was a good place to start.
Lunch on the Golden Circle
I don’t usually think of a tomato as something that needs much explanation. At the geothermal farm, it did.
Geothermal water provides heat for greenhouses, while irrigation supplies the plants with water and artificial lighting helps support growing through Iceland’s dark winters. There is a whole system behind being able to grow tomatoes year-round in that climate.
The heat was impressive, but I kept coming back to the work involved. A warm greenhouse still needs people who understand the plants and know what to do when something goes wrong. The tomatoes weren’t simply there because Iceland happened to have hot water underground. People had figured out how to grow them there.
Later that day, we tried the geothermal rye bread. The baking method uses a pot of dough buried in naturally heated ground and left to cook slowly. It is a practice that has been passed down through generations.
I was initially interested for the fairly obvious reason that I had never associated baking with burying something outside. But the more I thought about it, the more interested I became in the knowledge the method required.
With an oven, a recipe can tell you to set a temperature. With this bread, you also need to know the place. Where is the ground hot enough? How long should the dough stay there? A list of ingredients wouldn’t tell you everything you needed.
I hadn’t really thought of a recipe as a record of what people know about their environment.
For our group, the bread was one stop on a school trip. We got to try it and move on. The knowledge behind it had taken much longer to develop. That difference stayed with me: something I encountered as a novelty belonged to a history of people learning how to live in a particular place.
A glacier
The next day, we walked onto Sólheimajökull and heard from locals about how the glacier was retreating.
I found this harder to understand than the greenhouse. At the farm, I could follow the connection between the heat and what it allowed people to grow. On the glacier, part of what I needed to understand was missing.
I could see the ice in front of me. I couldn’t see where it had been years earlier.
Sólheimajökull’s front has been measured annually since 1930. Those measurements, together with aerial photographs, document a history of retreat and advance, followed by renewed retreat since the 1990s.
But during our visit, hearing people explain the change added something that looking at the glacier alone couldn’t. Someone who knows a place over many years has another version of it to compare with the one in front of them. I didn’t have that.
I started wondering what I would notice if I returned regularly. Would the size of the glacier still be the first thing that caught my attention? Or would I start looking for the places where I remembered ice?
I also wondered what it would be like to keep introducing visitors to a landscape while watching it change yourself. Our group was there for part of a day. The people explaining it to us would still be there after we left.
That made me more careful about what I thought I could understand just by visiting. I had walked on the glacier, but I needed people who knew it to help me make sense of what I was seeing.
The work behind a hot tap
Two days later, we toured Hellisheiði geothermal power station outside Reykjavík.
The plant generates electricity and supplies hot water for the capital region. For district heating, geothermal energy is used to heat groundwater, which then carries that heat to buildings. The process involves more than simply pumping naturally hot water straight from deep underground into someone’s bathroom.
By this point, I had seen geothermal heat used for growing food and baking bread. Hellisheiði helped me connect those experiences to a much larger question: what does it take to make a natural resource dependable enough that people can organize their days around it?
From a visitor’s perspective, it was tempting to treat the whole system as an obvious benefit of being in Iceland. There was heat underground, so of course people used it.
The history makes that explanation less convincing.
At Laugardalur in Reykjavík, people once washed their laundry in pools of naturally hot water. The resource was available, but using it meant going to the place where it surfaced. In 1930, a three-kilometer pipe connected Reykjavík’s geothermal washing springs to a school, marking an early step in the development of the city’s district-heating network. Municipal utilities and further investment followed over the decades.
I keep coming back to that difference between going to the hot water and having it brought to you.
It changes the questions I ask about a pipe. How much work did it replace? Who had been doing that work? What became possible once people could count on the connection?
At the power station, I was seeing part of the system that makes that convenience possible. At the other end were people heating buildings, washing, and getting on with their lives. They didn’t need to understand every piece of equipment we were learning about to use the water.
That isn’t something I think people should feel guilty about. Being able to turn on a tap without making it a project is a good thing. But the visit made me more interested in the people whose work allows the rest of us to give it so little thought.
The water and heat existed before the network did. The network needed people to build it, pay for it, and keep it working. Its history belongs to everyday life as much as it belongs to engineering.
Back in New Jersey
When I came home, I went back to sampling streams in Mercer County.
Sampling makes me pay close attention to what I can record: a location, a measurement, a change between visits. Iceland made me want to pay more attention to what I need to ask someone.
At the greenhouse, the important knowledge included how to keep a crop growing. With the bread, it included knowing how to cook in a particular patch of ground. At Sólheimajökull, familiarity with the place made changes visible that I couldn’t recognize on my own.
Those experiences are part of what draws me to water anthropology. I want to understand how people learn to live with water, what they come to expect from it, and what happens when it no longer behaves as they expect.
That matters to how I think about water access at home, too. Alongside questions about contamination and infrastructure, I want to ask what a household actually has to do to get through the day. Does using the water require planning? Extra expense? Does someone trust the people responsible for it, and what has shaped that trust?
I didn’t come back from Iceland with a solution for New Jersey. I came back more aware of how much I could miss by looking only at the physical system.
I still want to know what a water sample can tell me. I also want to hear from the person who depends on that water, especially when their experience complicates what I thought I understood.
ALL IMAGES TAKEN BY SARIN SINGHAL
BY SARIN SINGHAL
EarthForward is a non-profit organization focused on practical climate action – from reforestation and coastal clean-ups to sustainability education for youth and communities.
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