For those of you who follow Football, as you are aware it’s that time again when the FIFA World Cup takes place every 4 years. This time the 2018 World Cup is being hosted in Russia and here are the following countries who are competing: Russia, Belgium, England, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, France, Serbia,…
You may found your inbox filled with emails over the last month or so, from companies begging you to re-subscribe to their service and with page after page of updated privacy policy documents. This is because of a new piece of European Legislation called the GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation, aimed at giving…
We humans may wish for many things, but gravity is a horse we can’t wish away. And this horse drives what is happening at Kilauea. So far, the new stage of the old Kilauea eruption that started about one week ago has given us a very small subsidence caldera, a large earthquake, drained two lava…
Iceland suffers from eruptions on average every 3 to 7 years. And in between we tend to look at other volcanoes with interest. And as time goes by we forget that Iceland at any time can have larger and faster eruptions than pretty much any other spot on earth. During this phase of volcanic unrest…
It rains a lot in British Columbia. Here is where the Pacific Ocean dumps its excess moisture. The mountains are covered with trees; the lichen-covered branches drip in the seemingly perpetual rain or drizzle. The summers are mild and dry but don’t last long enough. The everlasting days soon end, and the autumn rains and…
In her 1948 novel “Trollkarlens hatt” (Finn Family Moomintroll), Finnish author Tove Jansson describes how on the first day of spring Moomintroll and his friends discover a large, black hat and bring it home without knowing that it is the Magician’s lost hat and that anything that stays in the hat too long will be…
I have lately read a lot of comments about Iceland being boring and calm. In reality nothing could be more wrong, Iceland is brimming with activity. So, let us take a quick look at some interesting volcanoes before we go to the namesake of this article. Volcanic activity in general If we start in the…
In hindsight, continental drift should have been obvious. That the Earth moves up and down had been known for centuries, shown by the layered beaches of Sweden, the seashells of the Himalayas, or the sinking harbours of the Med. The drowned and resurfaced Pillars of Pozzuoli became famous as the frontipiece of Charles Lyell’s opus…
Welcome to The Weekly Update! This week’s roundup follows last week’s fairly quiet period with another fairly quiet period with only 12 or so volcanoes producing enough of an ash cloud to be considered worthy of a VAAC report. Due to work commitments this week, the report runs from the 21st of April to the…
Welcome to a double edition of the Weekly Update. Following last weeks “incident”, where my cat Jeff somehow contrived to destroy my modem, this week we are covering two weeks worth of VAAC reports, so without too much preamble we will plow ahead. A slight change to how I have chosen to display the images this…