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…
Alberts latest article was a tour de force of the classic view of Mayan collapses, as it has been perpetuated in classic literature. The general idea is that the large downfalls in the Mayan empires would have been caused by large distant eruptions. This is of course an unfair summing up of Alberts quite more…
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,…
This week there are three volcanoes worthy of attention. So, I thought I would write a brief update on them since we have covered them either recently, or in detail. Without further ramblings let us go on to Gunung Agung. And as I came to my final and third volcano life coughed up a fourth…
There is a weird beauty to the blueprints for the Tsar Bomba design by Babayev-Sacharov-Trutnev. Never before, nor after, have a bomb reached that level of engineering perfection. It is to date both the largest, and the cleanest, nuclear device detonated. Compared to the inherently flawed Ulam-Teller design and its derivatives used by the US,…
This is based on an old post by Carl, The World’s most ill begotten piece of real estate – Part III, which has been slightly reworked. The Chinese have a saying, “May you live in interesting times”. And it is in no way a friendly thing to say; on the contrary it is a rather…
Ever since I began plotting earthquake data for Iceland and generally for the world (where data is available), I was planning to do a monthly review of the seismicity in Iceland, so we can keep track of it on a monthly basis. Of course, if there is any stronger activity or something unusual happens, usually…
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…
In physics, there is a famous tenement that reads as, ‘cause and effect’. But, for Hekla I find that the founding principle of the Bauhaus school of modernist architecture is far better suited to express what I will be trying to model and express here. It states that the form of a building will at…
I had intended to write either an angry op-ed, or a piece about Guatemalan volcanism. But, as usual Iceland had to butt in and grab the attention, so here we go (again). Seismic unrest at Herðubreið Before I write about what has happened in the last few days and about what is going to happen…