Posted on by Jón Frímann

Magnitude ML4.0 earthquake hits Blöndulón

Over the past few days (since 26th of October 2010) there have been earthquakes happening at Blöndulón. This earthquakes are intraplate earthquakes and it unclear why these earthquakes are happening.

At 02:35 UTC a earthquake with the size of ML4.0 did hit Blöndulón according to automatic SIL system that Icelandic Met Office has. So far this is the strongest earthquake to hit this area since the earthquake swarm did start. This earthquake appears to be a start of new earthquake sequence in this area. But several smaller earthquakes have happened as a result of the ML4.0 earthquake. The depth of the main earthquake was 1km. I do expect that it was felt in nearby farms that are closest to Blöndulón.

I am expecting more earthquakes in this area over the next few days. It remains to be seen if they grow in size or not.

Update!

When reviewed the size of this earthquake was ML3.8 at the depth of 21.1 km.

Text updated at 14:41 on the 31st of October 2010.

6 Replies to “Magnitude ML4.0 earthquake hits Blöndulón”

  1. As promised earlier, the follow on plot. Seeing as I waited, the big stuff that has gone on is included in the plot. I marked all larger than 3.0 events as stars.

    The APPARENT lineaments are presented in light blue dashes. I can’t tell you if this is real or not, they just seemed to group out like that. There could be nothing to it or is could indicate a fault plane between ancient dikes or something of that nature.

    http://i51.tinypic.com/35aub2f.png

    1. This plot with the suspected fault lines is remarkable in the sense that normally the fault lines run from south-west to north-east in Iceland. The lines drawn by you run perpendicular to the “normal” direction.

  3. Hi,
    There’s been a lot of activity at different volcanic sites over the past few weeks. There is a problem if you cross check the magnitude reading i.e anything above 2.5 and you use http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/ to verify you’ll find no entries
    for the Icelandic mainland. So something is not quite right!!
    Brendan

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