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”.…
Thank you to all that voted, we had a great turn out which certainly helps distinguish clear winners and other voting trends. I hope some of you managed to find the time to read up on some of the volcanic features you’d never heard about and gained some insight along the way. So, without further…
Following on from Carl’s latest post on some unrest in Iceland, I wanted to gauge public opinion on who they thought was going to make the headlines proper rather than the usual clickbait nonsense from the bile-spouting tabloids. I hope recent misleading headlines haven’t swayed our visitors into voting for their latest scare stories! Try…
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…
In the previous post, we read about the birth of Surtsey. It was a famous eruption, which taught us how quickly and unexpectedly new land can form. We have since seen similar eruptions elsewhere as well. Nishinoshima is a small and isolated Japanese island, 1000 kilometers south of Tokyo. An eruption started just off its…
(A repost, originally written by Carl, November 13, 2013. The post has been expanded from the original.) Tomorrow, the fourteenth of November, will be the official birthday of Surtsey. In a way it was a triple birth. First of all it was the birth of the Island of Surtsey, it was also the birth of…
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…
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…
We rarely, if ever write articles about earthquake swarms at the Tjörnes Fracture Zone. The reason for that is glaringly obvious, those swarms are incredibly common. Pretty much, a day without fairly intense activity is a rare beast indeed. So, this is a bit outside of the ordinary programming. The area is one of the…
I got the honour and privilege to be the author of the first blog post of 2018. So let me take this opportunity to wish all our readers, visitors and the managing team a very happy and healthy new year. The Bardarbunga eruption in 2014 was impressive in many ways. It was a rifting event,…