Askja for Beginners

I love large caldera volcanoes. The first reason is that they are always very beautiful, especially if they have lakes in them. The second reason is that most of them are of a class of volcanoes that leave their pointier cousins far behind. Size matters after all. At one end of the beauty spectrum, you…

Getting to Greíps with things

In this article I will pick up with the questions regarding age, GPS-tracks and the general setting. Knowing me it is quite likely that I will meander out into wild tangents as I go. Time to Greíp my pen.   The age of Greíp For a volcano that has not erupted (we will get back…

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.…

Hekla – Small things and stars in the night

I was asked to write a small weekend piece while we wait for Albert to finish the second part about Grimsvötn. My original idea was to write about people eating volcanoes, but thankfully Iceland saved us from that. As many of you have noticed Grimsvötn has thrown some big ones since my part of the…

Signs and Portents of Iceland

Icelandic volcanoes are all about long term projections. They do not do things in the short run, before any eruptions you will see either several intrusive episodes like at Eyjafjallajökull, or you will see signs of steadily mounting pressure prior to an eruption. For some Icelandic volcanoes these two processes goes on for decades, or…

The State of Affairs in Vatnajökull

Lately there have been a few earthquakes with a magnitude larger than M3 at the ring fault around the Bárdarbunga caldera. This has led to a lot of question about that particular volcano, and that is to be expected after a medium sized Icelandic eruption. They do tend to attract attention. This has been coupled…