Every few months, our friend Jack will mail us a handwritten note with some articles he thinks we would enjoy that he’s cut out of newspapers and magazines. It’s always fun to get these old-school packages in the mail. Jack’s latest envelope contained an article from the New York Times' Travel section about North Iceland that I can use to show the importance of consistency of wording throughout a piece.1 And because that's not a whole lot to hang a blog post on, I'll also consider the question in the headline.
In the article itself, tourist destination Dettifoss is "said to be the most powerful waterfall in Europe":
In a photo caption, the superlative is hedged a bit more and is "said to be one of the most powerful falls in Europe":
The inconsistency regarding whether Dettifoss is the most powerful or only one of the most powerful remains in the digital version of the article, though the "said to be" has been dropped from the caption.
I'm going to follow the NYT's lead on this matter and not attempt to definitively answer whether there's a waterfall in Europe that's more powerful than Dettifoss, especially because it's hard to get a definitive answer online as to how powerful Dettifoss is.
On various websites, the waterfall's power is measured in some large volume of water dropping every second. Guide to Iceland gives 193 cubic meters as the average volume of water per second and converts that metric figure into 6,186 cubic feet. Online converters tell me the figure should be 6,816 cubic feet.
Visit North Iceland says the flow of water is more than 2.5 times higher: 500 cubic meters of water per second, which comes out to 17,657 cubic feet, or 132,086 gallons, per second.
1Jack knows Tony and I visited Iceland a few years ago. We didn't see any waterfalls, but we enjoyed some great food and drink in Reykjavik and a stop at the beautiful geothermal spa called Blue Lagoon. The other article Jack sent us was a single-pager from WSJ. (that's not available online) about Jhumpa Lahiri's favorite things. When I lived in Brooklyn, Lahiri and her family were my upstairs neighbors for a year or two.