I don’t often do actual time-sensitive topical blog posts but it’s a Thursday, new blog day, and Iceland is threatening an eruption! Now, I wrote this at 11pm last night when it was still just a major earthquake swarm with no actual eruption but by the time this is published twelve hours later, who knows? (if anything has changed with the Iceland eruption, I’ll be updating this post before it gets published!)
In short, the Reykjanes peninsula has had some major seismic activity for the last week or so. This isn’t unusual. It had major activity last year and I got a little bit excited and the tabloids got a big bit excited and nothing happened. Over the last six or eight years, I’ve watched plenty of earthquake swarms that looked like they might turn into eruptions and then… didn’t. But this time, the people who know what they’re talking about are saying things like “an eruption is imminent, maybe in the next few hours”. I saw someone say “maybe in the next few hours, maybe the next few weeks, maybe never” and that’s absolutely right, these almost always peter out without much drama, but the fact that people are saying “maybe there will be an eruption soon” instead of “seismic activity is common, it doesn’t necessarily lead to an eruption” has me sitting up and listening. And what I’m hearing sounds quite similar to what I was hearing about the north-east of Iceland in the summer of 2014.
I’m hearing that there’s evidence of magma moving towards the surface, that the activity is giving off tremor pulses similar to those observed before previous eruptions, that roads in the area are closed, drones and humans banned from the vicinity – all of which suggests that people are taking the chance of an eruption soon quite seriously, more so than usual.
Let me present some resources.
First, my new favourite: Er komið eldgos? It’s a simple site with one purpose. Its name means “has the eruption happened?” and it says in big capital letters “NEI” or “JA”, no or yes, and that’s all it does. So far it’s firmly stuck on NEI.
Second, a webcam trained on Keilir, the existing volcano cone nearest to the suspected eruption site. I suspect this camera might get swallowed if the eruption starts there but still, it’s a pleasing view even if nothing happens.
For information, this is where you want to be, the Iceland Met Office’s (English-language) Earthquakes page. As of two minutes ago, when I took this screenshot, there had been 2,019 earthquakes registered in the last 48 hours.
As you can see, nearly half of them have been “pretty tiny” and about 84% of them have been “pretty small”, to use the technical terms. Iceland has small earthquakes like that all the time. If I go up north to Myvatn, they’ve had eight of those small earthquakes in the same time and no one’s saying a word. It’s the number of them on Reykjanes that’s so remarkable, as well as the 65 reasonably large earthquakes. There have been three more earthquakes since I started this paragraph, by the way, including a new M3.0, if you’d like an idea of the rate of these things.
Iceland has a major eruption about every four years. You all remember our old friend Eyjafjallajökull in 2011, a nice explosive eruption under a thick ice cap which produced incredible amount of ash and caused worldwide chaos. You probably didn’t hear about Fimmvörðuháls, which was a nice fountainy eruption in the same system a few weeks earlier. If you see pretty photos of Eyjafjallajökull with fire fountains, it was actually Fimmvörðuháls. You probably didn’t hear about Grímsvötn in 2011 either, a miniature version of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption that caused a small brief plume of ash that didn’t get high enough to do much more than rain back down on the locals and a bit of localised flooding. Maybe you heard about Holuhraun, which started erupting in late August 2014 and finally stopped in late February 2015, having produced a lava field that was in the top five largest created in human history. That one happened out in the wilds of the north-east corner of the country, a place accessible only for three months in the summer by serious 4×4, a three hour drive from the nearest bit of real road. The lava just poured out of the ground in a great glowing river for six months, sending up clouds of toxic gases that made people in the north-east close their windows but no ash, no chaos and no international headlines.
Katla may have done a small eruption in the last few years. She’s a kind of big sister to Eyjafjallajökull, ten times the size, and under a much bigger ice cap. If Katla erupts the way Eyjafjallajökull did, everyone on the planet will hear about it. Her previous pattern has been an eruption about once a century and as the last one was in 1918, a lot of people are awaiting some activity quite nervously. She had some seismic activity around 2016/17, and specialist equipment showed noticeable swelling but it came to nothing. It may have had a small pressure release under the ice, nothing powerful enough to break through but enough to shut down the possibility of an eruption for a few more years.
So if Iceland has an eruption around every four years and the last one started six and a half years ago, well, an eruption starting today would fit that pattern, if volcanoes were so considerate as to stick to patterns and calendars.
I’m not a volcanologist. I’m a travel blogger and Iceland enthusiast who owns a really pretty photobook of volcanoes. If you want to follow people who know what they’re talking about, I created a list on Twitter so that I could filter out everything else and just follow the eruption chat. Key accounts on that list are the Icelandic Met Office, of course, Dr. Thorbjorg Agustsdottir and Hugh Tuffen. Those last two are real life volcanologists, as are a few of the others, but they’re the ones I’ve been following through various accounts since the Holuhraun eruption in 2014.
In my inexpert opinion, any eruption on Reykjanes is likely to be similar in style to the Holuhraun one: lots of relatively thin lava and fire fountains that just coats the immediate area, sending up some gas that’ll make Reykjavik close its windows, although in March they’re likely to be closed already. I don’t think it’s likely to be explosive and it certainly won’t generate ash like Eyjafjallajökull because there’s no ice cap. What it might do is damage the roads leading to the airport, which is inconveniently positioned right at the tip of the peninsula.
Which road will it damage, the one along the south coast or the one along the north coast? The seismic activity map looks like it’s more likely to be near the south coast road but if this is happening near Keilir, that’s as close to right in the middle of the two as you can get. From the point of view of convenience and logistics, it would be better if it damaged the south coast road. The road along the north coast is the busy major road, the closest thing Iceland has to a motorway, which connects the only international airport in the country with the capital. The southern road isn’t built for that much traffic and it’s a huge detour to get to Reykjavik, although at least there is an alternative route. If you’re not familiar with the geography, that big purplish splodge to the right and above the swarm is Reykjavik and the smaller purple splodge at the bottom of the bit that sticks up to the left is the airport. Of course, there’s no saying what direction the lava will go and I’d probably close the road if there was any possibility of a lava flow getting near it.
I suppose an Iceland eruption close to the only major airport could happen at a worse time than during a pandemic. The decreased traffic might make arrival in Reykjavik Domestic more plausible – it’s a far smaller airport currently servicing mostly propeller planes small enough to have a storage compartment at the back instead of a proper hold. I have no idea whether the runway and the infrastructure is up to the sort of planes that fly internationally and the terminal certainly isn’t set up for more than about six small flights at a time. But better to figure it out now while it’s quiet than during Iceland’s usual tourist chaos.
Relatively few people stop off along Reykjanes. It’s just a thing to look at on your way from the airport into the city, where you get to see a mass of lava and a ridge of dormant volcanoes to tick off a “it looks like the surface of the moon” box. But there are a few stops out there. Obviously there’s the Blue Lagoon – I think if they’re going to put in the effort to protect anything from a lava flow, the Blue Lagoon and its neighbouring power station will be it. The Blue Lagoon is far too valuable as a tourist site to lose and while the power station isn’t the biggest or most important on the island, I think they’ll want to try and save it.
What might get lost or altered is Kleifarvatn, the big lake on Reykjanes, the Green Lake, which is much smaller but very green, and the hot springs area at Krýsuvík. That’s just nature, that’s just how Iceland works, and the new lava field will be fascinating but it’s going to feel weird to have that entire area rewritten, to see the scenery just change. It’ll get a lot of visitors. Even the most indifferent tourist will be more inclined to visit a new lava field if it’s right on Reykjavik’s doorstep. New tour companies will spring up, old ones will create entire new day trips – “Lava field & Blue Lagoon half-day tour”, “Lava field and horseriding tour”, “Lava field and Northern Lights” – and I look forward to doing them. That is, if this eruption actually happens.
Ironic, isn’t it? I’ve always said that as soon as an eruption starts, I’m dropping everything and flying off to see it and now there’s a very real possibility of an Iceland eruption, I’ve got plenty of holiday time and a healthier bank balance than I’ve had since ever, and it’s impossible for me to go and see the thing. Still, there’s social media and the internet and newspapers and I can at least watch from afar. I’ll keep you updated as well, at least until noon tomorrow, if there are any changes.
And I repeat, there’s a very strong chance this will all fizzle out and come to nothing, like it has so many times before.