Day: September 24, 2014

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Bárðarbunga daily update 24-September-2014

This information is going to get outdated quickly.

Current status in Bárðarbunga volcano at 21:47 UTC

  • Eruption in Holuhraun continues at the same phase as yesterday. There is however just one or two crater erupting at the moment. New crater might open without warning if anything changes.
  • The lava field is now around 40 square km in size. It is now second largest lava field in Iceland at the moment. Largest lava field did come from Hekla volcano in 1947 in 13 month long eruption. It is expected if anything changes that Holuhraun lava field is going to reach 80 square km size in about two weeks (or one and a half) time.
  • Largest earthquake since midnight had the magnitude 5,2. Other earthquakes today have been smaller in magnitude.
  • Bárðarbunga caldera continues to subside around 50cm/day. Total subside is now around 27 meters.
  • The lava field is going over a path that has been used by geologist to get to the eruption. The path in question is called Gæsavatnaleið. At last check that lava field had around 200 meters until it was going to go over the road and close it permanently.
  • Earthquake activity is increasing in the dyke. This suggest that pressure is increasing inside the dyke. This also means there is high risk of an eruption in new location in the dyke, inducing under the glacier with everything that follows it (glacier flood, volcano ash and so on).
  • If eruption happens under the glacier the harmonic tremor is going to jump up and glacier flood is going to be visible soon after that. Depending on where the water is flowing under the glacier.
  • No major change has taken place today.

Other things

I am sorry for this late update today. I got a hardware to watch Icelandic Television in Denmark over the internet (IPTV). But the video kept freezing and it took a while to figure that out. Turns out the problem is my current router, it just can’t handle the traffic. So I had to get a new router that did cost me 103,78€. The new router is going to solve this problem for good. The last router that I did buy did cost me 25€, I had to buy cheap router since I was broke at that time.

Article updated at 22:06 UTC. Corrected numbers about the lava field size.

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Bárðarbunga daily update 23-September-2014

This information is going to get outdated quickly.

Current status in Bárðarbunga volcano at 23:03 UTC

  • Largest earthquake from midnight was a magnitude 5,2 that took place at 04:33 UTC. Second largest earthquake today took place at 13:44 UTC and had the magnitude of 4,5. Other earthquakes have been smaller.
  • Bárðarbunga caldera continues to subside at around 50cm/day.
  • No major change has been reported today regarding Holuhraun eruption. That might be due all the geologist being on a convention today in Bifröst University.
  • Harmonic tremor suggest that more magma is flowing into Bárðarbunga volcano system. Increasing the pressure in it. Interestingly this does not appear to have created any inflation in the caldera, at least not any long term inflation is taking place in the caldera. There is less magma erupting from Holuhraun at the moment than is flowing into Bárðarbunga volcano, this is based on current data. It is clear that in new magma is going somewhere, but where is a question with no answer at the moment.
  • GPS data has stopped acting strange. I am not sure why that happened or why GPS data was strange for few days.
  • Harmonic tremor signal at 22:40 suggest a minor eruption did start and stop under the glacier. This was one of minor eruption that have been taking place in Bárðarbunga volcano for the past month. I don’t expect to have broken the glacier. If there is any glacier flood from this minor eruption it is going to small, since I don’t expect large amount of glacier being melted in this minor eruption.
  • Earthquake activity is moving south along the dyke from Bárðarbunga. That is not good since it suggests that pressure has started to increase in the dyke. This means new eruptions might start without warning where the dyke is located.
  • Storm is expected in Iceland tomorrow, with wind up to 35m/s. So detection of earthquakes is going to be difficult while the storm passes over.

Other new items I have not come across today. If anything new happens, I am going to add it here or write a new article if it is big enough event.