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…
It is nice to live on the crust. It gives a degree of stability which the rest of the Earth lacks. It is not perfect: the quiet can be punctuated by earthquakes or volcanoes, and lacking those there is still the off-chance of a landslip or flood. The atmosphere may also interfere with our lives.…
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…
Part 1 of a Greip Series This week, under the rumblings of Torfajökull, we return to one of our favourite areas within Vatnajökull that is yet to show it’s true hand. Or has it already and is there evidence to support that? Due to some recent activity, Carl has been getting increasingly excited in…
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.…
Let’s start with a question. Which country do you think has the most frequent volcanic eruptions? Before you read on (or peek below for the answer), take a minute to think about it. You can probably guess that Australia is not a front runner. In fact, only two or three countries readily come to mind.…
Grimsvötn is heading for an eruption. There can be no doubt about that. Of course, it is always heading for an eruption. This volcano has ADHD. For Grimsvötn, more than a decade of brooding is unusual: normally it just throws it out. A misplaced snow flake can set it off. And it produces not…
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…