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Iceland issues Bardarbunga volcano red alert

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Tawpgun

Member
Aww man,

I was just in Iceland for 5 weeks it would have been sweet to be around then. We heard reports of possible activity and were hoping we'd get to see it.
 

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Where do the get the 't' sound?
 

okno

Member
Double l is tl? I've been pronouncing jökull wrong all this time D:

Yep. Think of it like the "cl" in "click". Form your tongue flat on the roof of your mouth and press the air out of the sides of your teeth. It's a natural thing for me, but I always find if fascinating how many people have a hard time doing it correctly.
 

Kinvara

Member
So this volcano erupts violently or smoothly like Hawaii?

I'm no geologist but I'm pretty sure they are different. They are both volcanic islands but Hawaii is very unique geologically and there are many volcanic terms that are nearly exclusive to the islands.

Hawaii is located on a "hot spot" on the Earth's crust whereas Iceland is on the border between tectonic plates.

Iceland's volcanoes have the potential to be much more violent.
 
So this volcano erupts violently or smoothly like Hawaii?

If the eruption is strong enough to break though the glacier then it becomes explosive as the ice collapses down into the magma. But a lot of the magma seems to be moving outside of the caldera of the volcano, so it might turn into a fissure eruption after the initial explosive phase.
 

J Jizzle

Member
I hope this doesn't cause the same type of disruption to flights as last time. That caused so much stress in my work...
 

kick51

Banned
Right here! I can answer any and all questions you may have!

Edit: I should mention that I don't live there anymore. But all of my family is in Iceland. They're all pretty nervous about this one.



Are you guys rivals with greenland?
 
I'm no geologist but I'm pretty sure they are different. They are both volcanic islands but Hawaii is very unique geologically and there are many volcanic terms that are nearly exclusive to the islands.

Hawaii is located on a "hot spot" on the Earth's crust whereas Iceland is on the border between tectonic plates.

Iceland's volcanoes have the potential to be much more violent.

Ehh, the Hawaii volcanoes are slow burners because they are shield volcanoes which usually have far less explosive eruptions compared to composite volcanoes or cinder cones.

Hopefully this amounts to nothing. I have seen how bad some of those Icelandic volcanoes can be.
 
man, that link on the first page spooked me the fuck out. this is potentially much worse than an eruption over two hundred years ago that killed a quarter of Iceland's population and 1/6 of Egypt's population, destroying crops and making people choke on poisonous gases? wow, and i thought we already had enough bad news..

the fact these things are only a matter of time is so hard to accept. one day we'll be totally fucked by a supervolcano or a comet/asteroid, and it could be next week.

im gonna go for a walk
 

Strax

Member
Tourists are trying to walk and drive up (to) the mountain. I can't believe a ready to erupt volcano needs guards to stop people from risking their lives because they want to take pictures with iPhones
 

jstripes

Banned
Tourists are trying to walk and drive up (to) the mountain. I can't believe a ready to erupt volcano needs guards to stop people from risking their lives because they want to take pictures with iPhones

I don't have a hard time believing it.
 
Tourists are trying to walk and drive up (to) the mountain. I can't believe a ready to erupt volcano needs guards to stop people from risking their lives because they want to take pictures with iPhones

The volcano is under a glacier so there's nothing to see at the moment anyway. The magma is spreading out in a fissure around 40km long and growing so if it does erupt it could happen pretty far away from the main volcano itself.
 

SpecX

Member
I hope this doesn't cause the same type of disruption to flights as last time. That caused so much stress in my work...
Same here. We are already planning for the worse and starting to send more product to our European warehouse to plan for flight cancelations.
 
Not looking like anything big is likely, they reduced the alert down one level.

The level was raised to red yesterday because they thought an eruption had started, this turned out to be a mistake, so they've corrected that and brought it back down to orange. But activity is very much still ongoing, even more intense than yesterday, over 1,000 earthquakes today. The lowering of the alert just means an eruption isn't ongoing or immediately imminent.

I think the most likely outcome is a fissure eruption some time in the next days/weeks. Probably not very explosive or with a lot of ash, but with the potential to produce a lot of lava and emit a lot of gases, depending on the scale of the rift and how long it goes on for. The last really big one of those that happened in Iceland was Laki in 1783.
 

icy_eagle

Member
I'm no geologist but I'm pretty sure they are different. They are both volcanic islands but Hawaii is very unique geologically and there are many volcanic terms that are nearly exclusive to the islands.

Hawaii is located on a "hot spot" on the Earth's crust whereas Iceland is on the border between tectonic plates.

Iceland's volcanoes have the potential to be much more violent.

Actually Iceland is both on top of a hot spot as well as being a tectonic plate boundary.
 

Kinvara

Member
As most of you following this are already aware, there is some speculation that Barðarbunga's magma intrusion will reach the nearby Askja's magma system within a few days.

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Askja is just outside of this map to the north. There is a pretty good read about here: http://volcanocafe.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/bardarbunga-reader-question/

So their guess is that the magma intrusion could reach the Askja magma system August 29 or August 30?

I guess we'll have to wait and see.
 

Kinvara

Member
This will be a meltdown for air companies, they will bitch so much about groundings

Considering how we had two major flight crashes this year, they'd better not whine.

They should be grateful we have the technology to predict natural disasters like this.
 
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