After our ‘quantum Katla’ post, it is now time to return to the real Katla. For in the real world, Katla has been showing unusually strong shaking. It turned out that Henrik had already done much of the work for us. Here is a resurrected post from the dungeons of 2012 where young Henrik keeps…
Growth is in. Politicians and leaders (not always the same thing) want their country to grow. Nowadays this normally means economic growth: the wish to become more wealthy. It would make those leaders more popular, and may provide them with more resources to spend on whatever leaders spend money on. In the very different world…
The end of the Australian TV series Neighbours (which I to my embarrassment never watched) has created room for new home entertainment series. Iceland has stepped into the breech, and has created a serial volcanic eruption. We are now on series II of the Fagradalsfjall fires, just in time for the empty summer holiday schedule.…
After several days of heavy shaking, the new eruption started today. We know very little and are mainly enjoying the view. That there was an eruption is not a surprise, the location perhaps was. The earthquakes showed an intrusion in the general area of Fagradalsfjall. They were located a little east of last year’s dike,…
I love large caldera volcanoes. The first reason is that they are always very beautiful, especially if they have lakes in them. The second reason is that most of them are of a class of volcanoes that leave their pointier cousins far behind. Size matters after all. At one end of the beauty spectrum, you…
Geological time is interesting, because even the geological now is decades long, if not centuries. The current geological episode at Reykjanes didn’t start with Fagrafjall (it is no longer a valley, so let us drop the “dal” out of Fagradalsfjall shall we). Nor did it start with the large and very noisy intrusion over at…
A couple of weeks ago we got an email from one of our readers who is currently studying how to make ceramics and porcelain in Iceland. She was wondering about what ashes might give the best colours. I am not the best geologist around, and instead concentrate on the squiggly stuff on seismometers and bouncing…
First of all, I should clearly state that there are no current signs that an eruption at Katla is about to happen in the near future. Instead, the reason is that I was asked by one of our readers, Patricio Oliver, what would happen if the volcano erupted, especially for the inhabited areas. This is…
Background Askja is a lesser known major Icelandic volcano. The north volcanic zone (NVZ) where it is located is not as touristy as the east (Bardarbunga, Grimsvotn), the south (Katla) or the southwest (Fagradalsfjall) volcanic zones of Iceland, but it should not be ignored. The Krafla rift eruption here lasted (intermittently) for nine years, from…
Looking back to when Fagradalsfjall eruption started, I wrote a post about the Reykjanes Fires, where I speculated about how the eruption could end up being like. I mentioned two main possibilities. One was that it would turn out similar to the eruptions of the Brennisteinsfjöll volcanic system that took place 1000 years ago. The…