Posted on 08/23/2014 8:34:53 AM PDT by FlJoePa
Iceland raised its aviation alert to red Saturday as a subglacial eruption began at the restless Bardarbunga volcano, which has been rattled by thousands of earthquakes in the past week, the country's Meteorological Office said.
Seismic data indicated that lava from the volcano was melting ice beneath the Vatnajokull glacier, Iceland's largest, Met Office vulcanologist Melissa Pfeffer said.
She said it was not clear when, or if, the eruption would melt through the ice — which is between 100 to 400 meters (330 to 1,300 feet) thick — and send steam and ash into the air.
The eruption led Iceland to raise its aviation alert level to red, indicating an eruption that could cause "significant emission of ash into the atmosphere." Red is the highest alert warning on a five-point scale.
Aviation authorities declared a no-fly zone around the volcano but did not shut Icelandic airspace.
Pfeffer said scientists were flying over the glacier Saturday to look for changes on its surface. Scientists were also monitoring a hydrological station downstream from the volcano for flooding — a common result of volcanic eruptions in Iceland.
Authorities evacuated several hundred people earlier this week from the highlands north of the Vatnajokull glacier as a precaution. The remote area, 200 miles (320 kilometers) east of Reykjavik, is uninhabited but popular with hikers.
Iceland sits on a volcanic hot spot in the Atlantic's mid-oceanic ridge and eruptions occur frequently, triggered when the Earth's plates move and when magma from deep underground pushes its way to the surface.
A 2010 eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokul volcano produced an ash cloud that caused a week of international aviation chaos, with more than 100,000 flights cancelled. Aviation regulators since have reformed policies about flying through ash, so a new eruption would be unlikely to cause that much disruption.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
More global cooling. Now the enviro ninja’s will say it broke through the ice because of global warming...and now they know why this cooling is only temporary....and that the sky is indeed falling.
YIKES.....this is NOT good.
Iceland is a hotbed of seismic activity. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. The Earth is doing what the Earth has been doing for billions of years.
/johnny
Linking thread posted five days ago
CODE ORANGE: The Risk Of An 'Explosive Subglacial Eruption' In Iceland Just Went Up
"Kelly noted, however, that Bardarbunga sits under 700m of ice, or nearly half a mile's worth, and to break through this an eruption would have to be quite massive. "
Thanks blam...
Wow! Global warming has heated the Earth up so much that it’s starting to touch off volcanoes even under frozen ice now.
Iceland should have to pay to clean up this mess.
It’s always the quiet ones...
A volcanic eruption can flat out ruin your day.
Isn’t interesting that the various depth ranges given in various reports differ as they do.
There is somewhere between a 100 meters and a half mile of ice -—dah, its a glacier, I would tell them.
What we want to know is the ice thickness above the eruption now underway and the ice melt potential down below that as the above area superheats and causes melt off of the perimeter. Will small coastal villages be swept away — information distribution is not done too well anymore.
Yeah!
Where's the claim form. I'm filing for diminished yield in my fall garden due to lower sunlight.
Bardarbunga bump for later.
WHY?
This is more than about flooding.
A volcano under ice is putting out heat as well as hydrogen sulfide which turns into sulfuric acid that breaks down the rock underneath. The combination of the degraded rock and water “greases the skids” and when the heat finally melts the glacier to where it breaks off, you can get a lahar (a massive landslide, mud/debris flow) that can travel 100 miles per hour down a mountainside and literally fill the valley below in less than an hour.
That can happen even if there is no eruption of the volcano.
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