Posted on by Jón Frímann

New Geophone station (hopefully) starting in January 2011

I am going to setup a new Geophone station in January 2011. The station is going to be located on the Vatnsnes peninsula where i currently live (Hvammstangi). But it is going to be located on a remote farm in that area.

I still need to by few things for this station. What I am currently missing is a GPS clock (going to buy that in two weeks time or so), WLAN hardware and antennas for getting a WLAN signal over 500 meters distance and a PC for the software that reads the data from the geophone. If everything works out I should be able have the station up and running before I move to Denmark. This station is going to take over the job of Hvammstangi geophone station that I currently have at my home.

54 Replies to “New Geophone station (hopefully) starting in January 2011”

  1. May I ask why you chose this perticular place? It’s not on any active fault or volcanic zone I believe. Still awesome though! Looking forward to new data. ^^

      1. The sensitivity is going to be high as I can get it. But I don’t know the noise levels until I put the geophone in place there and get the data.

    2. I know the people how live there. So I have access to house and electricity. Too bad I cannot afford a UPS this time around. But I have to start somewhere.

      But this location gives me a chance to monitor earthquake activity north of Iceland mostly. But also around the geophone up to 1500 km distance (Mw6.5 at maximum range).

    2. I have always hated the plate boundaries as presented as the USGS kmz in Google Earth.

      The University of Texas has a project that gives a bit more detail on the boundary locations. In the Reykjanes area, you can see the alignment of known segments with physical features.

      The swarm that we saw at Krýsuvík is related by overall movement and stresses (platewide scale) but seems to be on a different segment. (2) than the one likely associated with the batch north east of Reykjavik (1).

      http://i55.tinypic.com/23t5vg9.png

      1. Each time I look at those fault lines, I feel Iceland being ripped to shreds. Ouch! 😐

      3. Lurking, I did not really understand this. Is the placement of the arrows and stuff correctly placed. I will try to form a couple of questions.
        1. The green arrows, are they suposed to represent movement or are they just there to point to the swarms?
        2. What does Reykjavik have to do with the placement of (2) or that green arrow?
        3. Where did the Hengill fractures go?

        The north-east quakes (I wouldn’t call them a swarm really) is happening at Raudholar and an old extinct volcano whose name just left my befuddled brain…

      4. The arrows point to items mentioned in the post. Mainly fracture/fault 1 that I think might be associated with the quakes North-East of Reykjavik, which was mentioned in the post that I responded to. No reason to bring it up other than that.

        Item 2 points to the cluster at Krýsuvík that we have been watching.

        I’m not sure what the Hengill fractures are. I know there is a set of “sprungur” tracking off towards Hekla, but they didn’t make it on to my plot since I didn’t find the shape file for them until after I had already posted. (I’ve been rummaging around my old drive for such things)

        I did find a Hengill up around 64°11′N 21°20′W with some geothermal activity if that is what you are referring to.

        As for relative plate motion, if you flip each arrow to the opposite direction, that would fit the general track of each plate.

      5. Now I am getting it:)
        I was a bit distracted by the gulf stream idiocy going on in the other thread. I have been writing a tutorial the entire evening for those people about currents of the world.

        The quake in the vicinity of Hengill district in 2000 was the reason for the “Sprungur”. http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/hengill/

        Remember that you have a 2 volcanos smack under the quakes at Reykjavik. South-east you have Raudholar (erupted some 6000 years ago) in Elliðaárhraun lava fields and north-east you have Esja and in between in a slight arc Brennisteinsfjöll (erupted 1500 years ago). I think those are on their own fracture related more to the Zone de Snaefellsness, especially Esja, than the Reykjaness-zone.
        Ie, a remnant of the old WVZ. But… quoting you, I am just an old physicist playing with numbers…

    1. If I have understood it correctly the purple ones are new sprungur and the black ones old sprungur. I had a look at a detailed map of Iceland at my local university and the rift-zones are just riddled with sprungur in every way. At least when they wherent covered in lava-field.

      @Transients and new-comers:
      When we use odd words it is probably icelandic, just ask otherwise you will think that we are idiots with secret code keys from a cerial box.

  7. I was getting pee’d off with the short list of recent comments – this is a very active blog, discussionwise – and opened the Comments RSS feed, for better to follow. However, it appears that not all comments get fed into that feed: one of Carl’s was on the recent comments list, but it never appeared on the RSS feed.

    Jón, can you do something about this? I’d like a longer recent comments list…

    1. I really second that. Especially since people are writing in different time-zones. When I come back from work or after sleep it takes a very long time to go through a couple of threads for interesting posts. And that is why my posts have a tendency to come in “spurts”…

      1. Its getting complicated by the tree structure of the comments. Which is on the other hand better, if you want to comment on a specific comment.

    2. This might be a bug in WordPress 3.0.2 that you are seeing. It might be wise for you to report it there or check for it.

      Currently I am not a programmer and there is little that I can do to fix this types of errors in WordPress.

      But there is also the chance that the comment got pushed out the rss feed due to many other new comments.

      1. I see this for a while. I think the problem is simple: WordPress usually keeps only the last 10 comments in the xml-file. This is a simple measure to keep the server load smaller, since the xml-file is transmitted every time, when somebody looks for fresh items in the feed. Even if this file is pretty small, it can generate quite some traffic.
        The “problem” with this blog is, that sometimes a lot of comments are generated in a short time. So you will miss these comments in the feed, when you are not updating it every minute.

  8. Unlike Carl, I find all posts interesting (sorry Carl, can’t resist when you lead with the jaw, will you forgive me?), even those inspired by Al Gore, “The Day After Tomorrow”, 2012 or suchlike. In some ways I find them even more interesting a.k.a. “entertaining”, at least from an anthropological point of view, as they prove that people will believe what they want to believe, no matter what science and logic tells them. Also, over the years I have found that people who put reason over the wishes of other people severely handicap themselves carreer-wise and tend to get mobbed by those who prefer a life of fiction.

    Jón, am I correct in the assumption that you will get a lot of data on the TFZ and, if so, is there a chance of the large swarms that do occur there being resolved and classified into “tectonic”, “magmatic-tectonic” and “magmatic” (unlike the service provided by the IMO)?

    1. My data is only going to be displayed as it is today. Currently I do classify earthquakes automatically. I have to do so manually if and when I get more information.

      All TFZ earthquakes are tectonic in nature. It is only around Kolbeinsey where you might start to see volcano related earthquakes again. The south end being just out of the coastline of north East Iceland where new volcanoes zone ends.

  9. Activity near Katla looks interesting: Two points, one at the western edge of the glacier, one at the eastern edge of the glacier. Yet, the depths are around 1-3 km? Fissure eruption in making?

  12. Back to our discussion on cold winters…

    A finnish newspaper Iltalehti has an article of the possibility of much colder winters in Scandinavia in the future. The article is in Finnish, but they have added a really nice illustration of the cause: http://static.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/siperia_graffa031210STL_uu.jpg

    The small globe shows the typical situation: A “normally strong” low pressure center near Greenland or Iceland (or about there) and a “normally strong” high pressure center in Mid-Atlantic (e.g. Azores) steer the warm weather fronts towards Scandinavia.

    However, the situation behind last winter’s coldness was different. Abovementioned centers were weak allowing the stronger eastern (Siberian) high pressure center to steer cold air towards Scandinavia. So the warmer western fronts are left with a route to southern Europe…

    Pretty clear after this illustration, even though I suspect that all details affecting the situation are not there.

      1. One meteorlogogist in sweden asked an interesting question regarding just that.

        Does the negative NAO cause cold winters? Or do cold winters cause a negative NAO?

  14. For those how are interested. This blog has almost 400 comments on a week now. So expect them to move fast when things get really busy comment wise.

  15. Can anyone confirm if Askja Volcano now is SWARMING? Anything out of normal activity!

    1. It’s not Askja, it’s a bit NE from it. The area is prone to swarms, but we’ll all watch it closely.

  16. I am appreciating the slow time to explore peripheral issues like climate and ocean currents and how they might link to volcanoes, or hot spots, or not.

  17. That swarm is getting stronger and bigger! perhaps its a dike intrusion which is now slowly propagating towards askja, because it seems to belong to the askja fissure swarm.

    Now a plott would be nice, but i suspect that the swarm might go on for a wile and then cease a bit (take a break and after the break, continue)

    1. The plot on vedur.is could be improved if the EQ depth was colour coded – the present colour coding for age is redundant. The mag 3.3 was deeper than most in the group.

      1. Something odd about the mag 3.3 location- the green star is not shown “18.9km SSW of Upptyppingar”, which would be near
        Valthalda, SE of Askja.

  18. i’ve been lurking in the background… Lots of interesting eq’s in Iceland now.
    i’ll get the popcorn popper ready… 😉
    Best!motsfo

  19. Well… looks like the conversation is over here.

    I know the forum software is gonna beat me up for this and stick me in a penalty box until the post is vetted against spam content, but here it goes.

    November / December quakes for the Herðubreiðarfjöll / Upptyppingar area.

    Plan View: http://i54.tinypic.com/1on784.png

    Perspective View: http://i51.tinypic.com/110deus.png

    View North: http://i56.tinypic.com/2jtnnl.png

    View East: http://i54.tinypic.com/35byydt.png

    In the plan view, if you draw a line from the center of the upper quakes in the middle of the plot, to the group directly to the North East, that is the plane that those two individual groups have most of their quakes lining up on when viewed edge on. I didn’t do that particular plot since the coordinates look a bit confusing at that angle.

    2. @Lurking

      Thanks for this plott, it really gives you a clear visualised view of what is happening.

    3. Lurking
      That tilted EQ distribution your excellent plots reveal was described for the 2007 EQs, here:

      http://radar.tudelft.nl/~ahooper/Hooper_et_al_ALOS_2008.pdf

      note fig 6 !!

      They suggest the sloped structure might be following a former cone slope intrusion.
      Theres alot of GPS data in the paper- wonder what is happening now?

      Wonderful to be keeping up with the professionals. Please keep the plots coming..
      Peter

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