Who doesn’t dream of escape? Perhaps you have a mind-numbing job, a repressive social environment, or a damp and cold house. It may be an escape in (and from) a computer game, trying to reach the exit while being chased by your real-time friends becoming virtual enemies. Sometimes we need to escape from a dream,…
Over the past weeks, the Fagradalsfjall has settled into in almost predictable routine. There are regular cycles of eruptions and interruptions. During the interruption, the tremor goes quiet. Nothing is shaking or moving on the drum plots. Over several hours, there is a slow build-up of the tremor. Lava begins to return to the crater…
A freezer provides storage. And a deep freezer gives deep storage. You can’t go deeper than an original ice-age glacier. In Greenland, those glaciers are still there, being so tall that the top has remained in deep freeze even though the ice age is a distant memory. In this cryogenic environment, that frozen memory is…
We have had quite a ride. The eruption began unseen, on March 19. The new fissure opened on April 5, after the initial double cone had begun to wane. The new fissures sprouted a series of cones, mostly twinned. By May, all twins had exterminated one of the siblings, and the survivors had battled for…
There is one question that has been bugging me lately. Why are there two types of eruptions in the Reykjanes Peninsula? Slow and fast. I have talked about this before, in here. Basically eruptions can be classified into two broad categories depending on how fast the maximum eruption rate is, which clusters into two end-members,…
Volcanoes are nature at its most impressive – and most damaging. The fire and the lava are a deadly alluring combination. Once the flow gets going, it is unstoppable. It may be deflectable: people are currently trying hard to save their road by building a wall. We were wondering, will the wall work? It would…
The eruption continues. There is so much hiding behind such an easy sentence. It continues – but always changes. It is not life as we know or understand it is the second most memorable phrase (at least in the paraphrased version) from Star Trek. This eruption is like that. You forget that this is actually…
This is quite an eruption, with surprises with every new turn of events. It is an unusually tourist-friendly eruption: conveniently located, small, non-damaging (except to the owner of the land) and spectacular. It does appear that not all tourists are as friendly to the virtual tourists, judging from the antics going on in front of…
To me the part of a volcano that is visibly erupting is the least exciting part. Perhaps a better way of stating it is, that it is only the effect of the cause. This is obviously not true to most people on the planet, so I think I owe everyone an explanation. And that explanation is especially important since we need to look deep into the volcano, to understand its future. Like most people I can obviously spend hours looking at lava bombs being hurled, and lava slowly filling valleys. But, getting…
Since the eruption in Iceland started, some of us have been wondering about other past volcanic events that we could compare it to, in such a search I came up with an Icelandic eruption that I believe might by a good analogue, and no, it’s not the Krafla Fires. Currently some of the characteristics of…