Iceland review - 2012, Qupperneq 88

86 ICELAND REVIEW
the weather rePort

Only once has the temperature reached
more than 30°C (86°F) in Iceland.
That happened on June 22, 1939, at the
farm Teigarhorn, close to the village of
Djúpivogur in East Iceland. The record is
30.5°C (87°F), to be exact. The Reykjavík
heat record was set on August 11, 2004, at
25°C (77°F). The record cold in Iceland
happened at Grímsstaðir á Fjöllum, on
January 21,1918—minus 38°C (-36.4°F). 
The strongest wind ever recorded in
Iceland occurred on January 16, 1995, at
74.5 meters/second (268 kilometers/hour
or 166 miles/hour) at Mt. Gagnheiði, near
Egilsstaðir, in East Iceland. The strongest
wind ever in Reykjavík was recorded on
January 15, 1942, at 39.8 m/s (143 km/h
or 89 m/h).
The record rainfall for one day hap-
pened on January 10, 2002, ten years ago,
at the farm Kvísker, in southeast Iceland.
On that single day, 293.2 millimeters of
rain fell, that is 293 liters of water on
every square meter of land. The wet-
test place in Iceland is Reyðarfjörd fjord,
in the East Fjords. In November 2002,
the precipitation there was 971.5 mm.
The record for one month in Reykjavík is
259.7 mm, from November 1993. PS
the long and
winding roadS

the distances from Reykjavík’s
city center:

Akranes 49 km / 30 miles
Akureyri 388 km / 241 miles
Arnarstapi (Snæfellsnes peninsula)
192 km / 119 miles
ásbyrgi 508 km / 316 miles
Bjargtangar (Europe’s western-most
point) 433 km / 269 miles
geysir 106 km / 66 miles
Mývatn 487 km / 303 miles
egilsstaðir 674 km / 419 miles
Keflavík International Airport
49 km / 31 miles
Höfn in Hornafjörður 458 km /
285 miles
ísafjörður 455 km / 283 miles
langisjór 242 km / 150 miles
neskaupstaður 715 km / 444 miles
Raufarhöfn 574 km / 357 miles
Siglufjörður 386 km / 240 miles
vík 186 km / 116 miles PS
Sara, anna and arnar

It looks as if names in Iceland are
beginning to show the effects of mul-
ticultural immigration and globalism.
According to Statistics Iceland, the top
fifteen names registered for boys aged
0 to 4 years old in 2008 were: Jón,
Daníel, Aron, Viktor, Alexander, Arnar,
Guðmundur, Gabríel, Kristján, Tómas,
Stefán, Magnús, Sigurður, Mikael, and
Ísak. The names Daníel, Aron, Viktor
and Alexander were much lower on the
list of all men’s names in 2007 (num-
bers 24, 37, 63, and 57), and the names
Gabríel, Mikael, and Ísak were not on
the list of the top 100 names at all.
The same is true for female names.
The top fifteen names for girls aged
0 to 4 years old in 2008 were: Sara,
Anna, Emilía, Katrín, Eva, María,
Guðrún, Kristín, Margrét, Júlía, Helga,
Telma, Viktoría, Rakel, and Aníta. In
2007, among all female names, Sara
ranked number 39, Eva 22 and Rakel
45, while Emilía, Júlía, Telma, Viktoría,
and Aníta were not on the list at all.
It seems that the old Icelandic names,
such as Hrafnhildur, Þorbjörg, Sigurlaug,
Þorsteinn, Haukur, Guðjón, and many
others that tend to be long and difficult
to pronounce—less amenable to global
usage perhaps—are being used less and
less. AS
F a c t s &
F i g u r e s
f&f