P van Rijckevorsel wrote:
Maybe they weren't there at the time?

According to
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinat...nvironment.htm
(re)forestation in Iceland is a recent thing, while the trees depicted in
http://icelandiscool.com/treepicture/
don't look as if they have been there a long time

When was she there anyway? If she was there when Iris was young then the
trees likely were not planted yet ;^)
PvR

PS to call this reforestation is taking a really long time view,
considering how long it must have been since the Ice Ages scoured the
country of trees!

Beverly Erlebacher schreef
And it hasn't been above sea level all that long, either!

What's mysterious to me, is how tree seeds could have gotten there before
humans arrived, although I suppose small seeded tundra species like birch
and willow could have come over on the ice floes with the polar bears and
arctic foxes mentioned in the first URL above. IIRC, the early settlers
had to import lumber from Scandinavia, and they, or the Greenland
settlers, actually coasted down to Labrador and Newfoundland to get wood
well before other Europeans discovered the Americas.

+ + +
A survey of woody plants of Greenland featured such species as Juniperus
communis ssp nana [now var saxatilis], Betula nana, Salix glauca and Salix
herbacea, as wel as some Ericaceae. I imagine Iceland is somewhat comparable
PvR