Iceland makes a best seller of a crisis

With helicopter flights over the Eyjafjallajökull volcano the latest attraction in this little country beset by financial and natural seismic upheavals, no one can say that the Icelanders aren’t engaging wth the situation.

The roaring best seller in bookshops across the country is – wait for it – no less that the 2,000 page, nine volume report on the financial crisis the country has experienced.

That says something very positive about Icelandic society.

It has just had some good news in that the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund has approved the second review of its economic stabilization program for Iceland. This will see the country able to strengthen its foreign currency reserves.

The importance of this matter was reflected in the stark terms used in announcing it, by Iceland’s Finance Minister, Steingrímur J. Sigfússon. He said that this: ‘ saves us, in fact. Not just in the coming months but now we believe we can get through the years 2011 and 2012′. This gives us a sharp insight into the hand-to-mouth reality of life in Iceland after the collapse of its banks.

And yet, the UK, whose Prime Minster has now admitted responsibilituy for the lack of regulation of financial institutions that encouraged the level of gambling they engaged in with such disastrous consequences, is dunning little Iceland for reparations with interest set at a level that will cripple its chaces of regeneration for many years.

While dealing with this ongoing situation the country has, of course, now got the eruptions at the Eyjafjallajökull volcano to deal with and severe flooding that is resulting from the heat of the magma melting the glacier, leading to evacuations of farms and settlements.

A new development is that scientists have now managed to take radar pictures of the craters, on 15th April, from a Coast Guard plane . The sheer size of the is quite numbing. Here is the Ieland Review’s article on this achievement with one of the radar photographs. It could be an aged ET – a numbig image as well as a spooky one.