Posted on by Jón Frímann

Small harmonic tremor spike from Hamarinn volcano

There seems to be a small harmonic tremor spike taking place in Hamarinn volcano (Bárðarbunga volcano) at the moment. This tremor spike is not strong at the moment. This tremor spike appears to have been pre-seeded by few long period earthquakes (not all of the earthquakes seen on Skrokkalda are from Hamarinn volcano, few are from Katla volcano), but that suggests that magma is on the move in Hamarinn volcano. But this would the second harmonic tremor in a time period of 48 hours it seems.


The harmonic tremor spikes can be seen at the end of this tremor plot. Copyright of this picture belongs to Icelandic Met Office.

Currently it is impossible to know what happens in Hamarinn volcano. As it’s pre-eruption behaviour is rather unknown. But if there is a eruption in this area I am expecting a lot of earthquakes, with size well over ML3.0.

Blog post updated at 16:20 UTC.

85 Replies to “Small harmonic tremor spike from Hamarinn volcano”

  3. Happy birthday… hope Hamarinn is not planning a birthday suprise for you !!

    2. Doesn’t mean much I noticed it on that first block of rise then it went to natural then spiked again. Now it seems natural again. Who knows if that will be it or if more spikes will come.

  5. Jon, do you know Hamarinn’s eruptive history? Is it known what VEI eruptions have happened there in the past?

  7. This always happens when I am out working.
    Just wondering if there’s any earthquakes in the area yet.

      2. That’s very unusual I think it has just been quiet on the quake front. I thought the quakes added themselves through the monitoring equipment?

    1. They must be running Windows, it’s so good at freezing the computer!

  11. I was about to comment despite the quietness to keep an eye on Skrokkalda.
    http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/oroi/allarsort.html

    Yayyyy! I think I have finally identified a harmonic tremor all on my own!!! At last!
    Jon I do hope you are having a lovely day. The weather doesn’t look too bad for you. Will you be having a small party?

  13. Are there any html masters here ? Because I was trying to fix this web page for the person how hosts the Hekla geophone for me. But while trying to replacing the counter code, I managed to break the web site frames.

    http://www.heklubyggd.is/vedur.htm

    Now I need to fix it somehow. But I am poor in html. What needs to be done is to get the images to the centre of the web page. It also has to scale correctly.

    Thanks for the help!

      1. I meant try inserting a after on line 316

        (of course without the spaces)

      2. Try inserting a closing "/DIV" html tag on line 316 after the "/CENTER" tag

        (I wonder if I will be able to post this correctly)

      1. Still got probs?
        I do know html and did create many webpages with it.
        This code was done with frontpage?
        ouch
        I did take a look at the sourcecode, many many unnecesarry code in there.
        Straight html-code (done without any editors) works much better.
        And http://www.w3schools.com/ is the best place to learn and try out the code

  14. Jón:
    A small birthday gift in your account.
    Happy Birthday once again.

  15. Happy birthday Jon, hope u had a relaxing day and cool beer too.

    Has Gola station gone off the map for anyone else

  16. That latest spike is on all stations again, has there been a big quake somewhere?

    1. Harmoic tremor spike at SKR station seemed to be rising just before that.

  17. Hi, this is my first comment at this very interesting blog. The last weeks volcanic activity is very exiting, I have followed the met. site since eyjafjallajökull last year. I checked this site today: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php?area=eu&lang=eng and discovered that there are 3 warnings about activity in Iceland – Hekla, Katla and Vatnajökull! Is this special – or is it normal for Iceland to have this much activity? Happy birthday to you, Jon Frimann, and keep up your good work. 🙂

  21. It’s back working again. Showing a red dot in Mýrdalsjökull. Very tiny though, barely on the scale.

    1. Could it be that if there’s been a system downtime and earthquakes occurred during that, they have to be added manually to the public vedur.is website?

  23. Blimey it seems it was just quiet, katla area just had a little baby earthquake.

  24. What is that structure in the foreground of the Hekla View webcam?

  25. Several small new earthquakes in the Katla area, 3 of them happened around the same time…no major sizes though.

    1. Katla is always having quakes, even when it isn’t restless so until you see hundreds of them in a span of one day, a handful of them in any one hour means nothing really.

  26. up to four red dots on now in the katla caldera i believe, with another red one to the NW of it! No new measurement on the most recent one, out of the other, one broke the M1 bar

  27. re’ recent Katla video and the ice craters that have water in. I am curious of all the water. It looks like the deep blue sea. Like the tip of an iceberg in reverse Is that effect like a trick of the light and ice? There seems to be a scum floating on the surface. The water looks almost too blue to be a reflection of the sky alone. Like an old china clay mine in Cornwall in the UK, full of chemicals from the mining process.
    The obvious lower ash layer from EJ in the small yet deep vent stuck out too, there were more layers of ash and other interesting things I expect but the video was Internet quality, not a moan about quality thankful to have seen it at all. Did anybody take stills of the craters with water in?

    1. It’s a trick of the depth of the water, (probably light,) and the color of the sky on the water that has melted into the crater. Haven’t seen any stills (remember it’s size compared to the helecopter, the craters are huge).

      1. Well, they are all loading up now but a couple of hours ago about half the SIL stations had broken links and weren’t coming up at all.

        I think that could just be natural/noise at ASK since it looks like a gradual and not sudden jump up from the background levels.

        The spike at the end of a lot of the stations seems to be from a 1.6 at Katla.

  29. A sharp 1-pixel spike on Katla SIL stations suggests to me that here have been some sizable earthquakes in the caldera.

    1. Sunday
      17.07.2011 11:43:04 63.641 -19.097 4.6 km 1.6 90.01 6.8 km N of Hábunga

      2. Couple of earthquakes around that part of the country this morning, that might be what the spikes are.

    2. This might actually be noise rather then actual harmonic tremor. As there are few volcanoes nearby and the ones that are close to this station are currently quiet.

  31. The earthquakes around there where off shore, I’ve been eyeing the swarm there the last few days. Not sure if it’s on an underwater volcano or not. There always seems a lot off earthquakes at the fracture zone though.

  32. I see IMO have now added some quakes that were missing from yesterday.

  34. This is going to be a long comment about my current status. As many of you supported me. I feel right that you know what you are supporting.

    Current problem

    My current problem is that I have a debt of 685.000 ISK ($5.823,84, €4.111,89, 30.656,00 DKK current exchange rate). I am in the progress of paying it down with the bank. But given my extremely low income it is going to take time (currently plan gives me ~21 month), even I am living as cheaply as I can at the moment. But I am currently just renting a room of a relative in order to cut costs.

    I even took an low paying job in order to help with this paying down my debt. But that job is exhausting to me and comes down on my writing. Both on this blog and on my planned books that I am going to release soon as possible.

    Social issues

    As I have told on this blog. I do not want to live in Iceland. Some people might want to do that. But not me. I do not fit into Icelandic society for so many reasons. The main reasons is that I do not follow the living standards that society demands of me. That is to own a house, car and whatnot. I have no interest in following that path like the other people. I have no interest in owning a car and a house and whatnot. I also don’t drink alcohol or smoke, so that makes even more at odds in Iceland. Specially in small community that I am currently living in. There are also other issues that I have with Icelandic society and culture. But that is a comment that I am going to tell about at different time.

    I also made the lifestyle chose the few weeks ago to live a debt free life for the rest of my life. In Denmark I get tolerated for my chooses in life. I feel that is not the case in Iceland.

    This has effects on my writing. Because in this type of environment I develop major writer blockage on everything else but blogging about current events. I feel that I am getting there fast. But I was on my way from it when I moved to Iceland from Denmark due the money issue that I have been having now for a long time.

    It has been little more then a month since I moved from Denmark. I already do not feel so good living in Iceland due to above reasons. I want to get out of Iceland and fast. But currently there is little that I can do about it but to work hard on it.

    Solutions

    My solutions to the social problem is to move from Iceland. I have found that I fit into Denmark society quite well. I just need to learn on it and the language. I was getting to that point when I moved from Denmark in June.

    Some pointed out that I should use crowd sourcing web page to collect money in order to move back to Denmark. I do not know if that works, as I do not know the idea fully.

    Moving to Denmark is going to cost about 20.000 DKK, €2,682.66, $3,795.97 (current exchange rate). I am yet to figure out where to get this money when I am debt free in Iceland when the time comes. I hope that my book publishing gives me at least some money to move back to Denmark.

    The road ahead

    I did change my mind on Friday. I am going to the school this winter (better then getting bored where I currently live). But that means I have to slow down my payment rather of the debt that I have with the bank. But this also means that I am going to be suffer the “I am broke” problem for the coming months. I am going to get some money from my apartment deposit since I lived in Denmark. But that is not a lot of money, just about 5300 DKK I think.

    I hope that I can move back to Denmark in the year 2013, hopefully early. But it depends on so many factors that I at the moment just hoping for the best.

    The reason why I also delayed the move from the year 2012 to 2013 is that I want to make sure that I at least have some steady income in USD, GPB and Euro before I move back to Denmark. Even if it just a little income. As that would be better then nothing at all. Since I am not expecting ISK exchange rate to improve any time soon.

    School also means no work this fall. As I had planned in my first plan, that did not work out when I looked better into it. I expect to be in school until end of the year 2012. So that I can go directly from school and move to Denmark in the year 2013 as I told above.

    This is my current status. I hope people understand my rather annoying problems. But this are problems that I hope to be over in about 1 to 2 years time when I move back to Denmark.

    Thanks for the support and understanding. The people how donate get free e-book about eruptions in Iceland (new ones) if they want to.

    1. Hi Jon, I just gave you a small donation to thank you for this blog, it is not much because I cannot afford much but I hope it helps. 🙂

    2. thanks for your blog – I hope your debt-problems could saved in the next time. my “help” is small – but better than nothing.

    3. I still feel strongly that the most salient solution is to recruit and partner with a web entrepreneur to form a company to commercialize a new volcanic oriented web site that is geared towards a fee based subscription to the site where the fee would be small enough to attrack economies of scale. Enlist GoDaddy to help to develop, promote and tweak the site.

      The subscription would grant access to web content and both and email/SMS text notification system whenever a volcanic event is both developing and appears imminent.

      Why? Because there are scores of peope out there outside of Iceland who, for a myriad of reasons, would want to know when an event is highly likely and likely to affect them and plan accordingly. These people typcially don’t have the time and energy to study and learn about volcanoes and sit and watch them every day, but who would benefit greatly from having advanced notice which could be a matter of hours to days.

      I am convinced we are entering a very active period for Iceland and that these volcanoes are going to impact economies, crops, lifestyles, air traffic, etc, etc.

      If that site were up and running right now, I’ll bet you could get 5,000 subscriptions in less than 1 month at $7.95 per. You do the math

      Stop and think how many investors are out there that would want to protect their investments, for example, in airlines alone.

      The time for this was months ago and it may start to become too late.

  35. I hope your debt-problem would be saved in some years. Thank you for thise blog

    1. I am going to pay up this debt as fast as I can. But it is going to take time on my current income.

      I just want to wipe this debt out so I can move to phase 2 of my plan. That is to plan and prepare the move back to Denmark. But my plan is currently in phase 1 and is going to be there until I finish paying up my debt.

  36. What income will you have in Denmark Jón?

    Quote
    (The main reasons is that I do not follow the living standards that society demands of me. That is to own a house, car and whatnot. I have no interest in following that path like the other people. I have no interest in owning a car and a house and whatnot. I also don’t drink alcohol or smoke, so that makes even more at odds in Iceland. )
    Hehe are you a sheep that follows the other sheep, living standards, bullshit. Just spend what you have for income…… works for me.

    But great work on the website.

    1. At this moment my income in Denmark would depend on the ISK to DKK exchange rate. But it would be low at the moment, around 6200 DKK currently.

  37. I completely concur with Jons goal to be completely debt free, especially with the current situation economies and govt’s are in. Some business ventures are exceptions to this as you have to prime any pump to get it to work. Otherwise a very noble and wise goal, especially with what I see coming.

  39. Jon-
    I used an Australian crowdfunding site to help me get to iceland- I never imagined it could be so successful. You have a lot of followers here- you use the sites to ask for help from strangers, friends, family, your volcano networks- post link to your blog for passers through to know about campaign. It can work if you put enough time into it. The one I used is based in Australia, so I’ve posted a link to a site talking about ones in US & Europe.
    If you try, and it works out like mine, you could raise enough to pay out your debt and get equipment to set-up your site the way Ron etc. are recommending. Good luck!

    http://blog.webdistortion.com/2010/07/18/9-crowdfunding-websites-to-help-you-change-the-world/

    1. Thanks for the link. I have already started to think about this, and giving me some time looking into it. But I won’t have proper time until end of July when I quit the summer job that I am in.

      My goals are in part met, in regards to this web site and having few geophone up (two at the moment) and running. But I want to expand my geophone network in Iceland to build a better monitoring with it. That all costs a lot of money. But I know that I can do so if I get the money. So this might be a good way to do it as you say.

      Thanks again for this. 🙂

      1. You’re welcome- you could do it to pay your debt too- if you’re up front about it with the project you set up and explain your goals- to pay debt and to get equipment to set up your volcano activities. you seem to have a lot of people here sympathetic to your situation so its worth a shot- you have nothing to lose! Really wish you the best- a million hits is suggesting this is really working for you! 🙂

      2. I am also looking into that. But it would help this along if I got rid of this debt some way.

        But I am going to pay my debt regardless if I get support or not from people. But with no support it is going to take longer time to pay it back to the bank.

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