Standing on a continental edge offers a staggering sense of seeing the edge of time, the edge of space. Iceland’s Thingvellir National Park, where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates are visible above ground, exposes fault lines and fissures, the fracture of earth’s lithosphere, a jagged divide of continental crust. The force of continental drift creates a liminal space, a chasm where the earth quite literally breaks apart. Yet Thingvellir is not a cinematic, volcanic river of magma, rather a 7-km-wide rift valley park you can walk through.
Witnessing where the earth moves under our feet raises profound questions about what edges portend today. There’s a sense that humanity is on the verge of something fundamentally new, the brink of a new era with uncharted frontiers. The momentum toward Singularity underlies a mounting collective anxiety and wonder, seemingly inevitable, at times palpable, yet as invisible as shifting tectonic plates....