Day: March 17, 2013

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Weather has been problem for monitoring instruments on Mýrdalsjökull glacier this winter

Bad weather has been a major problems for monitoring Katla volcano (and others also) this winter in Iceland. Not only has the bad weather damaged communications setup for the instruments in question. But also has a lot of snowfall prevented solar chargers and windmills that generate power for this instruments made them fail. In many cases the instruments them self are also under several meters of snow in few cases.

This means that for long periods during this winter there have been no data recorded on several SIL stations on Mýrdalsjökull glacier. But last week technicians from Icelandic Meteorological Office and University of Iceland did go up to Mýrdalsjökull glacier to try and fix the broken instruments and hardware in question. They had some success. But have to return later to repair the hardware they where not able to repair this time around.

Icelandic news about this repair mission can be found here. This news is in Icelandic.

Mýrdalsjökull leikur mælitæki grátt (Rúv.is, Icelandic)
Fréttir: Jökullinn leikur mælitæki grátt (Icelandic, Video)

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Earthquake activity intensifies in Skjaldbreið

The earthquake activity that started in Skjaldbreið yesterday continues. This earthquake activity has been picking up in number of earthquakes. But when this blog post is written no earthquake has been over magnitude 2.0. That however might change if this earthquake activity picks up more from the current activity level.

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Earthquake activity in Skjaldbreið south of Langjökull glacier. Copyright of this image belongs to Icelandic Meteorological Office.

It is hard to know what is going to happen in this earthquake swarm. But earthquake activity in this area is often “slow”, in the terms it is slow to start and reaching its high point. If that is going to happen now is impossible to know. All that can be done is to watch and see how this earthquake swarm progresses and if any stronger earthquakes start to appear. Stronger earthquakes might not appear at all in this earthquake swarm. But they also cannot be ruled out.

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Three earthquakes in Hekla volcano

During the night there where three earthquakes in Hekla volcano. All of the earthquakes where small with the magnitude of 0.6 up to 0.9. Depth of this earthquakes was on the range of 10.7 and down to 11.8 km. No other activity has followed this earthquakes in Hekla volcano since this earthquakes took place.

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The earthquakes in Hekla volcano. Copyright of this image belongs to Icelandic Meteorological Office.

Currently there are no signs of volcano eruptions in Hekla volcano. If that changes I am going to write about it. But for now Hekla volcano is as quiet as it has been since the year 2000. When last eruption took place.