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Earth Science

Four of Iceland's Main Volcanoes Are All Preparing For Eruption (icelandmonitor.mbl.is) 136

Vulcanologists always watch Iceland carefully -- it's the one exposed place on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, with 130 different volcanoes -- and something big may be brewing. Applehu Akbar writes: Now that four of Iceland's largest volcanoes are showing signs of impending eruption, the world may be in for another summer of ash. Katla, Hecla, Bárðarbunga and Grímsvötn have all had major activity in the past, including vast floods from melting glaciers, enough ash to ground aircraft over all of Europe, volumes of sulfur that have induced global nuclear winter for a decade at a time, and clouds of poisonous fluoride gas. When the mountains of Iceland speak, the whole world listens.
Eruptions are already overdue for both Hekla and Katla -- Hekla's magma chamber has filled up, and Katla last erupted in 1918. "The Katla eruption would lead to the melting of the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, resulting in a glacial flood," reports Tech Times, "likely to hit areas where large crowds are found at any given point of time, especially the black sand beaches of Sólheimasandur and the village of Vik in Southern Iceland."
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Four of Iceland's Main Volcanoes Are All Preparing For Eruption

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  • by ColdWetDog ( 752185 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @04:38PM (#53847395) Homepage

    Mother Earth stands ready to combat global warming with some nice ash clouds. Thus saving civilization as we know it.

    Or wiping it out entirely .....

    (Just depends on your point of view.)

    • im glad the only thing's we have to deal with in arizona is heat & monsoon's.
      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @05:10PM (#53847509) Journal

        Here in the UK people living in flood plains get flooded, who would have expected that eh? And then they go complaining to the government. That's mostly as bad as it gets.

        • by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @05:40PM (#53847657) Journal
          Yeah, everyone said it was daft to build a castle in a swamp...
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by knorthern knight ( 513660 ) on Sunday February 12, 2017 @01:05AM (#53849415)

          > Here in the UK people living in flood plains get flooded, who
          > would have expected that eh? And then they go complaining
          > to the government. That's mostly as bad as it gets.

          Many years ago, local governments would dredge river channels every so often, so they wouldn't flood. Good. Then Britain joined the EU. Along came unelected Eurocrats, who imposed ridiculously punitive/expensive standards regarding the disposal of the dredged up mud/silt. Result...
          * local authorities couldn't afford to dredge river channels
          * river channels silted up
          * rivers flooded

          Well... like... duhhhh. To add insult to injury, the flooding was wrongly blamed on global warming. It was crap like this that contributed to the Brexit vote result.

          • by popoutman ( 189497 ) on Sunday February 12, 2017 @05:46AM (#53850107) Journal
            Incorrect.
            In recent years, more houses have been built in areas that were previously uninhabited. The resulting inability for storm water to drain into the soil and instead being forced to run off, increased the rate that water flowed into the river systems, meaning that rivers peak higher and sooner for the same amount of rainfall. This means more floods for the same weather patterns. Add in climate change and you lot are screwed for flood management.
            Absolutely nothing to do with Brexit.
            Actually, now that you lot are leaving, you won't get access to the emergency funds to help with problems like this that UK policies have caused over the past few decades...

            As an aside, dredging can actually cause floods further downstream as it allows more water to reach the downstream areas in a shorter space of time, causing the river to "pile up" and overspill its banks, where it would not have happened if the dredging had not taken place.

            • by Cederic ( 9623 )

              you won't get access to the emergency funds

              Whose fucking money do you think pays for those emergency funds?

              (For the next two years)

              • Whose fucking money do you think pays for those emergency funds?

                (For the next two years)

                Easy answer there. The Germans. Don't believe the proven lies spouted by the pro-Brexit idiots..

                • by Cederic ( 9623 )

                  While I happily acknowledge that the Germans make a sizeable net contribution to the EU I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that all of their contributions to go the other countries that do not.

                  Rather than one of the few others that also makes a sizeable net contribution and keeps getting told it'll stop getting anything back, as though paying a corrupt Eurocrat bureaucracy to route the same money was actually better than just using it where it's needed.

            • "In recent years, more houses have been built in areas that were previously uninhabited"

          • So people designed a city and build housing around a requirement for continuous and extensive dredging of the rivers with a non trivial impact on the environment, and it's the EU's fault.

            That is some brilliant logic right there.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward

            > Here in the UK people living in flood plains get flooded, who
            > would have expected that eh? And then they go complaining
            > to the government. That's mostly as bad as it gets.

            Many years ago, local governments would dredge river channels every so often, so they wouldn't flood. Good. Then Britain joined the EU. Along came unelected Eurocrats, who imposed ridiculously punitive/expensive standards regarding the disposal of the dredged up mud/silt. Result...
            * local authorities couldn't afford to dredge river channels
            * river channels silted up
            * rivers flooded

            Well... like... duhhhh. To add insult to injury, the flooding was wrongly blamed on global warming. It was crap like this that contributed to the Brexit vote result.

            No the UK government cut the funding. Nothing to do with the EU.

          • by vinlud ( 230623 )

            Considering right across the channel, in that lil' country called 'The Netherlands' there are no problems at all with dredging rivers and channels while still being a full EU member, it seems you are good at inventing stories to blame the EU.

          • by Jahta ( 1141213 )

            Many years ago, local governments would dredge river channels every so often, so they wouldn't flood. Good. Then Britain joined the EU. Along came unelected Eurocrats, who imposed ridiculously punitive/expensive standards regarding the disposal of the dredged up mud/silt. Result... * local authorities couldn't afford to dredge river channels * river channels silted up * rivers flooded

            Well... like... duhhhh. To add insult to injury, the flooding was wrongly blamed on global warming. It was crap like this that contributed to the Brexit vote result.

            Except it had nothing to with the EU. In the UK we should be looking at our own national politicians, especially the Conservative Party [theguardian.com]. From TFA:

            "Cameron cannot say he was not warned: he has ignored red flag after red flag, right from the start of his premiership. In the first year of the coalition, he cut capital spending on flood defences by 27% year-on-year. That was despite the 2008 Pitt Review – a systematic analysis of major floods in 2007 – concluding that much more funding was needed."

            A

      • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @07:16PM (#53848065) Homepage

        I'll take volcanoes any day over heat. :) And monsoons... what, you mean precipitation? Yeah, I think we've got that covered ;) Mýrdalsjökull (Katla's glacier), along with neighboring Eyjafjallajökull, and further away Vatnajökull, are the wettest places in Europe, with over 10 meters of precipitation per year (although we don't have the record for wettest inhabited area... because living on top of a glacier on top of an active volcano would be pretty damned stupid ;) ).

        • Eyjafjallajökull, and further away Vatnajökull

          Do you put all those diacritical marks on words just to confuse us?

          What happens in a Scrabble game?

          • There are different national versions of Scrabble. Here's Icelandic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions#Icelandic [wikipedia.org]
          • by Rei ( 128717 )

            They're different letters. Ö is like the "e" in "bed" said with rounded lips, while O is sort of like "Aw", while Ó is like "Oh"

            And the words just long and look alien to you because you don't know the root words, and thus where to split them. Pro tip: because the joining form in Icelandic is usually eignarfall (possessive), try splitting them at common eignarfall endings (-a, -ar, -s, and less commonly -u) into components at least four letters long. So in this case: Eyja.... Fjalla.... Jök

            • What makes things easier for English speakers is that a lot of the Old Norse geographical terms have survived as English place names in areas that have a history of Viking contact. In hiking the northern UK I encountered a lot of -fell (mountain), -foss (waterfall), -ness (point), -water (lake) and -wick (bay) names.

              • by Rei ( 128717 )

                The only one of those I don't recognize is -wick ;) Oh wait, maybe that's "vík"? Like in Reykjavík? A vík is a place where the coastline sort of gives way, so a small bay would fit.

                You can add to your list -ea, -a, -y correspond to "ey", meaning "island". For example, Swansea = Sveinsey = Sveinn's Island; Lundy = Lundey = Puffin Island; Westray = Vesturey = West Island; etc.

                • Yes, names like Prestwick are derived from -vik for bay. And i forgot to mention all those -ey names, for islands, and -stead, for place.

        • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          . . . damned real estate developer!

      • by Anonymous Coward

        And superfluous apostrophe catastrophe

      • by dtmos ( 447842 ) *

        And incorrect use of apostrophes.

    • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @07:14PM (#53848063) Homepage

      Speaking of Mother Earth [youtube.com] and Iceland... ;)

      That's "Hún Jörð" ("Mother Earth") by the band Sigur Rós - it's an abbreviated version of the Lord's Prayer in Icelandic, except to the Earth instead of God. Also, screaming. Good music for volcanoes preparing to go off.

      Or, if you want something more directly volcanic themed, there's always Jón Leif's Hekla [youtube.com]. It's often described as the loudest piece of classical music ever composed, although that's only if you perform it with its full design intent of instruments, which I don't think anyone's ever done. Said instruments include "four sets of rocks hit with hammers, steel plates, anvils, sirens, cannons, metal chains, choir, a large orchestra, and organ".

    • Volcanoes are zits on Mother Earth's nipples. But they do let out more greenhouse gases than all human created machinery - from cars to planes to everything that emits carbon dioxide
      • by stjobe ( 78285 ) on Sunday February 12, 2017 @08:15AM (#53850443) Homepage

        Volcanoes [...] let out more greenhouse gases than all human created machinery - from cars to planes to everything that emits carbon dioxide

        Eh, no [skepticalscience.com]: "Volcanoes emit around 0.3 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. This is about 1% of human CO2 emissions which is around 29 billion tonnes per year."

  • Scale (Score:5, Informative)

    by SteveAstro ( 209000 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @04:50PM (#53847437)

    From WikiPedia

    The flood discharge at the peak of an eruption in 1755 has been estimated at 200,000–400,000 m3/s (7.1-14.1 million cu ft/sec), comparable to the combined average discharge of the Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers (about 266,000 m3/s (9.4 million cu ft/sec)).

    THAT is a lot of warm water.

    • Re:Scale (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @05:22PM (#53847565)

      From WikiPedia

      The flood discharge at the peak of an eruption in 1755 has been estimated at 200,000–400,000 m3/s (7.1-14.1 million cu ft/sec), comparable to the combined average discharge of the Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers (about 266,000 m3/s (9.4 million cu ft/sec)).

      THAT is a lot of warm water.

      There probably are more spectacular floods elsewhere on earth but these glacial floods are still relatively impressive

      https://baldpacker.smugmug.com... [smugmug.com]

      I was in Iceland during and after the last major floods. Those I-beams came from a road bridge, the beams are about 1 meter high and were bent up and torn apart like liquorice sticks. The same flood also washed out ice blocks the size of houses that took months to melt down. It was quite surreal to drive down the coast road with those massive blocks of ice lining the road like houses. Made one realise how small and insignificant humans really are.

      • Re:Scale (Score:5, Informative)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @07:32PM (#53848111) Homepage

        Not in historic times there haven't been. The fact that Iceland's volcanoes launch these sort of superfloods once every several hundred years is something not seen elsewhere in the world. This canyon, for example:

        Ásbyrgi [blogspot.com]

        is under 10k years old. It was carved primarily by just one or two superflood events, but the flow rate estimates (based on the size of the boulders thrown around) are as high as 900000 cubic meters per second. In Icelandic, if a flood is less than 45000 cubic meters per second it's defined as "non-catastrophic". By comparison, the Niagara River at Niagara falls is 2400 cubic meters per second.

        The very word for this type of flood is Icelandic - "jökulhlaup". Literally "glacial run". And the name for the sediment deposits they leave behind is also Icelandic in origin - "Sandur" (literally "sand").

        • by aevan ( 903814 )
          Totally offtopic, but.. damn that's gorgeous.
          • Re:Scale (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @10:42PM (#53848801) Homepage

            Yeah, I love my country. :) We're packed [google.com] with natural treasures. Geology that changes in realtime** can do that ;)

            ** Seriously, it really does change over human timescales. Right near Ásbyrgi there's a lake called Skjálftavatn which feeds the excellent fishing river Lítlaá. Neither existed until the 1970s, when tectonic activity from the eruption at Krafla rerouted the underground springs.

    • THAT is a lot of warm water.

      A jökulhlaup is actually ice cold.

      • Re:Scale (Score:4, Informative)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @07:47PM (#53848159) Homepage

        I guess it depends on the situation. But the three main ways they tell if there's been a small jökulhlaup are a) monitoring flow rates, b) monitoring electrical conductivity of the water, and c) monitoring water temperature. Rising flow, EC and temperature are all signs of jökulhlaup. You also often get a sulfrous smell to the water and reduced clarity.

    • Re:Scale (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @07:55PM (#53848187) Homepage

      Also, one thing that's neat when the subglacial eruptions go off is the sigkatlar (I think the english is "ice cauldrons") that form on the top of the glacier. They can get huge - when Bárðarbunga went off, the main (shallow) section of ice that was sinking was the size of New York City (surrounded by deeper but steeper sigkatlar). The big, shallow ones are harder to see, but the smaller ones are often ringed by fissures [wordpress.com] - which may not look that impressive from far away, but they're really huge [www.lhg.is].

      As a side story: while Bárðarbunga ended up with its last eruption breaking out in the most fortunate place it could have, there would have been something kind of amusing (amid the devastation) had it actually gone off straight over its magma chamber. Many decades ago a plane crashed on the glacier, right over the caldera; the survivors had to survive for days on the ice, in terrible weather, until rescuers could get to them. Because of the huge precipitation rate there, the plane is now deep inside the ice over the caldera. But had it erupted with an explosive eruption from the caldera.... the airplane would have flown again ;)

      • Why, I wonder, does a lot of the terminology of volcanology come from either Icelandic or Hawaiian? [Files "sigkatlr" under "ice withdrawal structure", by analogy with the well-known "salt withdrawal structures", such as the incorrectly named "Silverpit 'Impact' Structure".]
    • The water isn't particularly warm, and often has considerable amounts of (slowly melting) glacial ice floating along in it (and considerably increasing the erosive power of the flood.

      Seriously, downstream of a Jokullhlaüp is a good place to not be. to the side - interesting. But have an escape route planned if you intend to be a witness not a statistic.

  • Nuclear ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alexhs ( 877055 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @05:10PM (#53847503) Homepage Journal

    volumes of sulfur that have induced global nuclear winter for a decade at a time

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

  • by careysub ( 976506 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @05:26PM (#53847587)

    Glacier outburst floods are known as "jökulhlaups" in geology, an Icelandic word since it has been the scene of many historic floods of this type.

    In 1755 a jökulhlaup from the Katla volcano had a peak flow of up to 400,000 cubic meters/second, about 20 times the flow rate of the Mississippi River, or twice that of the Amazon, making it briefly the largest river in the world.

    But that's not the only destructive aspect of Iceland's volcanoes. In 1783 the eruption of the Laki volcano released 14 cubic kilometers of basalt and 1 cubic kilometer of airborne ash. It killed 25% of Iceland's population through poison gas: 500 million tons of hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide were released poisoning the population and the livestock. The fatalities were both from direct poisoning (mostly from the hydrogen fluoride) and later starvation since most of the livestock was killed. The toxic cloud affected much of Europe as well, though not as severely. This eruption also created a three-year long period of unseasonable cold in the northern hemisphere leading to famine killing thousands, and possibly contributing to the French Revolution.

    • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @07:42PM (#53848135) Homepage

      The irony is that the French Revolution led to the Napoleonic Wars, which Denmark losing Norway, which led to them clamping down on their other strikecolonies/striketerritories, which led to resentment, the Icelandic independence movement, and ultimately independence from Denmark.

      Yeah, Laki was really horrific. It's hard for polar volcanoes to affect the climate like equatorial ones do, but the scale of the amount of gas released was nonetheless so great that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans. The African and Indian monsoon failed, leading to severe famine in Egypt; 6 million people died. Benjamin Franklin was the first person to correctly attribute the cause of the weather to an Icelandic volcano eruption (although he incorrectly stated it as Hekla, which seems to have been the only Icelandic volcano that people in that timeperiod seemed to know [wikimedia.org], due to its habit of dusting mainland Europe with ash ;) )

      Once every 100-200 years Iceland has some truly catastrophic eruption. Laki has had two since the settlement period. Askja, Katla, and Hekla are other sources. Barðarbunga is a real giant (largest lava eruption of the Holocene), but it hasn't had any catastropic eruptions in a while. It's still quaking up a storm since it's last "little" one (little by its standards, still bigger (both volume and flow rate) than any eruption Mauna Loa has ever had).

    • So if I got it right, then after the next 'event' the Icelandics will ask Europe for help, which then will list the following demands:
      Free our friends the bankers that you (rightfully) have imprisoned,
      Accept a privately owned, Rothschild controlled central bank,
      Borrow loads of money from our private banks for rebuilding of your country by our construction companies, so in the future you will be under our control, forever.
    • An interesting book if you want to know more about this event: https://amazon.com/Island-Fire... [amazon.com]

    • Glacier outburst floods are known as "jökulhlaups" in geology, an Icelandic word since it has been the scene of many historic floods of this type.

      In 1755 a jökulhlaup from the Katla volcano had a peak flow of up to 400,000 cubic meters/second, about 20 times the flow rate of the Mississippi River, or twice that of the Amazon, making it briefly the largest river in the world.

      Completely off-topic: I love hearing people speak Finnish (got a few really old family members and a friend who speak Finnish), but Icelandic is the one language that I marvel over even more because it sounds so cool. When Eyjafjallajökull erupted I just had to learn how to pronounce it, and mention it to everyone I talked to, of course. Bárðarbunga and Grímsvötn might require a little work.

  • Is the Tech Times article click bait or plagerized? It reads like it was copied, translated by machine, and pasted into somebody else's byline. Broken English quotes are fine, but at least have the pride to edit the copy by hand before publishing. Anne Baker sounds like someone who can write native English, if I can be so presumptive
  • ord.

    Katla: I'm going to explode now :-) any second.. 5.. 4.. 3..
    Hecla: No sorry you can't you haven't prepared.
    Katla: What, prepare? man I want TO EXPLODE NOW, how to prepare???
    Hecla, You have to notify the airlines, fill the right govt forms.
    Katla what...... boooooooooommmmmmmmm

    • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday February 11, 2017 @07:44PM (#53848147) Homepage

      You got it backwards. Katla's the one that would go off without giving the airlines any notice. It's actually a serious safety issue; some people are arguing for a permanent no-fly zone over her, because she tends to go off with no warning whatsoever. Not always, but often. And she tends to have explosive eruptions. It's doubtful that an airplane approaching her would have time to divert before the ash cloud reached it.

      • And she tends to have explosive eruptions.

        So, a more derived (higher silica/ more viscous) magma, most likely. Implying a larger upper-crustal (5-15km depth) magma chamber for differentiation than for the other volcanoes. Interesting.

        I'll keep on watching the earthquake reports [vedur.is]. And I'll try to get the ö in jökullhlaup right more often until you get your thorn and I can type ÐÐÐÐ (Cyrillic, like :paka") without problems.

      • I hav a mental image.

        Co-Pilot to ATC : "One of our pilots is missing!"
        ATC to Co-Pilot : "Good film but what's your message?"

        Co-Pilot to ATC : "Also, one of our wings is missing, and half of the fuselage. We were flying over Katla."
        ATC to Co-Pilot : "Thanks for the warning. We'll try to find your bodies when it's all over."

    • Here's some more scientific research on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckle_and_Jeckle [wikipedia.org]
  • You can't have nuclear winter induced by a volcano. There's no nuke involved. (also, read "Comrade J")
    I recently saw someone post that the most recent winter storm in the U.S. was caused by Mother Earth being pissed off at us because of the drilling related to the Dakota Access pipeline. Good grief.

    • Nuclear winter has nothing to do with radioactivity. It's all about dust kicked up by sufficiently large explosions blocking sunlight. The same effect can be caused by impactors.

      In the year 535, Something Happened. For several years the Earth turned cold and dark. Crops failed and multitudes died. Ice cores for the period show excess sulfur but no iridium, which points to volcanism as a cause. The point of eruption has not been identified.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • Nuclear winter has nothing to do with radioactivity. It's all about dust kicked up by sufficiently large explosions blocking sunlight. The same effect can be caused by impactors.

        True, except for that last part. If it wasn't caused by nuclear weapons, it isn't "nuclear" winter. Such events occurred long before we had nuclear weapons, and have never actually been caused by nuclear weapons.

  • Yes, loads of solar and wind power that will rescue these ppl for the next couple of months while these volcanoes errupt and fill the skies.
    Oh WAIT. Thank god that they are not 100% dependent on solar based energy (solar, wind, and hydro), because they are about to have it
  • From the statement that 'four of Iceland's largest volcanoes are showing signs of impending eruption' it sounds like that is unusual. I wondered if there were other signs of tectonic activity so I went to the USGS site at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ear... [usgs.gov] and downloaded some data. It would only let me download 20,000 events to a CSV so I took all data since 1/1/98 of 6.5+ on the Richter scale. Once that is thrown into a pivot table and a regression analysis done, it shows a very clear time linear regression
    • it shows a very clear time linear regression of increasing moderate-intensity earthquake activity over the last 20 years.

      Did you correct for increasing numbers of seismic stations being able to detect medium-range smaller quakes which weren't picked up in previous times?

  • Put a bag around Iceland, and make them pay for it.
  • ... expect to be blind-sided by something unexpected.

    Because Mother Nature isn't a bitch, but he doesn't give a shit about any of the skin rash they've got.

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