Sunday, May 22, 2011

Let's visit Iceland again.

Remember Eyjafjallajokull, the small erupting volcano in Iceland that brought air travel to a standstill over England and Europe? The one that gave us haunting beautiful photographs and a tongue twister of a name.


The heat from the lava was so intense that it melted several glaciers nearby. This is a bit like "Where's Wally" but he's there in front of this enormous chunk of glacial debris sitting on the bedrock of where its icy surround used to be.


So the Grimsvotn volcano, under the Vatnajokull glacier in south-east Iceland, has begun to erupt, throwing a plume of white smoke about 15 kilometres into the air. It last exploded in 2004 but even though it's one of Iceland's most active volcanoes, its effects are expected to be only local.

It just melted through several tens of metres of ice and sent a large volume of course-grained ash into the atmosphere.

Just another day in Iceland, move along folks, nothing to see here......yet.

2 comments:

Marie said...

Grimsvotn is always grumbling, so I am hopeful that this is just another of its usual dummy spits. But one never knows. At least the ash from this is more coarse, so it's not forming those immense ash clouds we saw last year, even as far away as here.

JahTeh said...

Marie, such a lot of volcanoes having the rumbles lately so I go and buy the worst volcano movie of all time, cost $2 so it doesn't count. But when IMDB has about 400 comments saying don't watch this, it's dreadful I'll have to after spending so much on it. And what's not to love about a volcano in the middle of New York.