Free Republic

A powerful earthquake swarm continues on the Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland since February 24th. Over 20.000 earthquakes have now been detected since the beginning of the earthquake swarm. As the series of strong earthquakes continues, more signs of magma movement are also being detected. This has prompted the officials monitoring the situation, to raise the alert level from yellow to orange.

Despite grounding 100,000 flights across Europe , battering a beleaguered airline industry, stranding hundreds of thousands of travellers, disrupting schools and businesses, and giving homes under flight paths their first peace and quiet in decades, the current volcano eruption may be only a teaser of chaos to come. A far bigger Icelandic volcano, Katla, is tipped to erupt in the coming months, potentially causing much more savage and sustained disruption to industry and society. Eyjafjallajokull erupted on 14 April, forcing European governments to impose a no-fly zone. Each time Eyjafjallajokull has erupted in the past 2,000 years – in 920,...

REYKJAVIK (Reuters) – A volcanic eruption in Iceland, which has thrown up a 6-km (3.7 mile) high plume of ash and disrupted air traffic across northern Europe, has grown more intense, an expert said on Thursday. The eruption under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier continued to spew large amounts of ash and smoke into the air and showed no signs of abating after 40 hours of activity, said Pall Einarsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland. "The seismographs are showing that since this morning the intensity of the eruption seems to be growing," he said. Hot fumes had melted up to...

I looked forward to returning to Iceland. It had been seven years since I last lectured there, and I remembered it as a beautiful, rugged country, great for hiking and swimming. I was scheduled to deliver four lectures on Iran, Iraq, and transformative diplomacy at the Universities of Iceland and Reykjavik, and at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Keflavik. This trip would not be so smooth. Word of trouble began to percolate in the morning of the first lecture. A local antiwar activist was demanding my arrest as a war criminal. My crimes were multifold: Writing an article blaming...