Iceland can do surprises. Its main activity is in a limited number of volcanoes which can erupt anytime, with frequencies ranging between once per century to twice per decade. These are the usual suspects, including Grimsvotn, Bardarbunga, Askja, Katla, Hekla, Krafla. (Grimsvotn is the only one not ending in ‘a’.) The beasts can go small…
Grimsvotn is not just another volcano; It’s a special beast that captivates both Mafic Maniacs and Caldera Crazies. This volcano plays many characters, producing everything from expansive lava flows to basaltic Plinian eruptions but mostly mundane lava flows or irrelevant explosions For me, Grimsvotn holds a special place among other volcanoes, ranking among my…
Jon Steingrimmson was deeply worried. The eruption had been going on for three weeks already. Lava coming down from the hills, flowing down the river valleys and covering the farm land. But it wasn’t the lava that was doing most of the damage (at least not yet – worse was to come). It was what…
October 12, 1918 was just another Saturday. On the fields of France, the Hundred Days Offensive was turning a war which would now soon end, but leave 17 million dead; the devastation would set the scene for an even worse war to come. Far away, Puerto Rico lay in ruins after a magnitude-7 earthquake on…
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble Do you remember that famous Australia TV soap where everyone in the town helped each other with their mini-crises, such as ‘who took my surf board’ and where the life guard walked around the beach in their swimmers? (I may be getting confused here with…
Due to the ongoing Reykjanes activity, I’ve grown interested in subglacial Icelandic lava flows. When lava is erupted under an ice cap, it tends to pile up rather than flow away. It makes a conical or ridge-like mound of pillow lavas known as a tindar. When lava reaches the surface of the glacier, it starts…
A repost on the past of Grimsvotn, as it seems to be nearing its next eruption, albeit not on the same scale as the one described here! It is sometimes hard to understand the size of the Icelandic volcanic systems. We often read statistical things like “Half of all the ash in Europe” and “One…
We are still learning. There is much we humans don’t know about volcanoes or about how they behave. The past few years have been enlightening. It all started in January 2020, the Svartsengi region started rising, and an elliptical area of inflation appeared that encompassed Mount Thorbjörn, the Svartsengi Power Plant, and the 800 years…
Due to this article being so graphics heavy, I had to break it up into two parts, with the second part coming tomorrow evening. It is somewhat ironic that my brain is operating mainly in a graphical mode, and that I think in visualisations and graphic models, whereas at the same time I am about…
This is a repost of a summary by Hector, of the previous round of Reykjanes eruptions, a millennium ago. (The post is not as old as that, though. It was written during the first Fagradalsfjall eruption, at the very start of the new fire season.) The discussion includes two of the three Svartsengi eruptions of…