Possible runup phase at Fagradalsfjall

The current swarm at Reykjanes Peninsula that has been going on since the M5.7 NW of Krysuvík on Wednesday at 10.05 declined over the last couple of days. Today it became reinvigorated with 10 earthquakes above M4. At the same time the earthquake swarm go reinvigorated signals was detected pointing towards movement of volcanic fluids…

Future calderas

Volcanoes erupt all the time. It may seem a quiet time to us but that is because most eruptions are small and low impact, and stay below the radar. An excellent daily overview can be found on http://lechaudrondevulcain.com/blog-spotlight-two-column/ As I write this, it lists on-going eruptions at Sinabung, Etna, Stromboli, and Sabancaya. Volcanodiscovery also lists…

Þorbjörn’s Tormented Tribulations

As Þorbjörn rumbles on it seems ever likelier that it will erupt. So, to explain what is happening I decided to pull out all the stops and produce a more definitive article explaining the news and a possible future now that Albert has put things into context. So, without further ado, I would like to…

Was Puyehue Cordón-Caulle really a VEI-5?

That the question even exist is a bit of an oddity in modern volcanology, after all we have known amply how to take ejecta-depth measurements to create Isopac-maps since 1956, more about that below. The reason that this question has prevailed is that there are anomalies in the numbers proven for the eruption, compared to…

A Green Hawaiian Interlude

A little article while we happily wait for the USGS to confirm that Kilauea is about to sprout a green caldera lake, or not. I normally do not write a lot about Kilauea, the reason for this is that it rarely does anything interesting. But, in 2018 it did quite a lot of interesting things,…

The Forgotten Volcano

A few days ago, I was sipping on a rum and coke as I was flying over Kilimanjaro and the great continental divide ripping East Africa away from the embrace of the rest of Africa. As I did that, I got to ponder the other major tectonic powerhouse, Iceland. People tend to forget or underestimate…

Greip update (June 2019)

After a wonderful series on Krakatau by Albert, a mysterious island by Carl and a seismic “Intermezzo” by Lurking, I have decided to take things back to Iceland for a while. Most of us know Greip by now, and we are going to take another look at it, from a more seismic perspective with some…

Unrest at Torfajökull

  This is just a short piece about mounting unrest along the extension of the Veidivötn Fissure Swarm as it is running through the Torfajökull volcano. Torfajökull has two known magma reservoirs, one on the south east side that is mainly andesite-basalt, and a rhyolite chamber towards the south-west. The current lineament is having the…

Greip: A prequel on instrumentation

This is both an informal start of our series about a promising central proto-volcano, and a story about the problems of sifting through the bewildering number of signals that the instruments yield for us to peruse. Let me start out in the stars. A friend of mine work with SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial signals.…

The Life Aguatic

We got a letter from one of our readers this week pointing out a seismic series near Agua volcano and Ciudad de Antigua in Guatemala. “I’ve been living in Guatemala for a while, staying in Antigua. On April 27, the area around, and on, Agua volcano started to shake. We felt at least 8 quakes…