I was just in your country a couple of weeks ago with my daughter. She had always wanted to see Iceland and I have to admit the geography was stunning.
One of the tours we took was to a town near Reykavik on the coast. They had a church on a nearby hill that everyone had to be able to evacuate to in case a glacier tongue broke off and went into the sea. The tour guide said that the sea level at the coast would rise a lot for a brief period of time and that anyone who couldn’t get to higher ground within 20 minutes of the glacier break off would drown. I wonder if this is in the same area.
CLA: I hope you had a good time. It sounds like you probably were at town Vík í Mýrdal, which is in the dead center of an expected flood from the bigger volcano Katla, which we have been expecting and dreading for a while.
But as EBH pointed out, they are linked, so this could offset the wait for that eruption for a long time. Katla is bigger, and would probably affect more people as Vík has a bigger population than this hopefully will affect directly. But this eruption could devastate bigger and more importantly better land, which has been cultivated for a long time.
A green lush paradise could become a sandy wasteland of volcanic floodplaines, full of poisonous chemicals. The area around Vík is allready so although slowly greening up through our projects of binding the soil, but maybe CLA and his daughter did see an area, especially driving from Reykjavík to Vík that will be forever changed due to these events. Of course it could also be much less than chatastrophic, we just don´t have enough information at present.