Activity at Hekla and The Dead Zone

While we are waiting for Öraefajökull to drop a Christmas present and Grimsvötn to hatch an Easter egg, we instead might get a gift from Hekla. And at the horizon suddenly, a far darker bird looms. So, once more we must ask and answer the age-old volcanic question; what gives in Iceland? Hekla Many people…

Iceland in ashes

I had never seen the Manchester sky so blue. The usual milky white which goes by the name ‘Manchester sunny day’ was gone, transformed into an azure experienced mainly during distant holidays. Great Britain of course has a bit of a reputation. Already the Romans wrote that “the atmosphere in this region is always gloomy”.…

Signs and portents of Iceland – Revisited

When I planned to write this article about the current states of Iceland I only wanted to write about Katla and Öraefajökull. But, as things turned out a third volcano got my attention. In the end this article will be about how hard it can be for a layman to see what is important and…

Dissecting Hekla

Hekla is the most mysterious of Iceland’s many volcanoes. Its brooding summit overlooks the broken plains 800 meter below as if it were an English Lord (or perhaps Lady) of the Manor. The fiefdom looks bare and uninviting, but that is not purely Hekla’s fault: once this was dense forest, but it was cut down…

Black Swans and Iceland

Two weeks ago I wrote about statistics and the possibility to predict volcanoes in any way by using statistics. I think that the point was a bit lost, my entire point was to show that it was impossible to in any useful manner predict when an eruption would occur, and also that it is impossible…

The Usual Suspects

This week there are three volcanoes worthy of attention. So, I thought I would write a brief update on them since we have covered them either recently, or in detail. Without further ramblings let us go on to Gunung Agung. And as I came to my final and third volcano life coughed up a fourth…

Remodelling Hekla – A 1947 commemorative article series

The point of this series of articles is to propose an alternative model of dynamics, driving forces and magma fractionation at Hekla. It is thus not utilizing the standard volcanological model of how a mantleplume stratovolcano function. 5 years ago, I started to have grave misgivings about how we interpret and model Hekla, as such…

The Strangest Volcanoes In The World – A Non-Official List

This cbus05 classic was published in 2014, during the height of Holuhraun. It is well worth re-reading, and so we are very happy to give it a rerun. And we are equally happy to commend his Big-Volcanic.com blog to you! In light of the extremely unique and interesting events going on at Vatnajökull, it’s interesting…