Posted on by Jón Frímann

Increased geothermal activity in Grímsfjall volcano

According to a news by Morgunblaðið (mbl.is) there is a increased geothermal activity in Grímsfjall volcano. The news reports that in fields close to the houses (hud or something like that) that research and mountain group have in the area there is increased geothermal activity. There is hard to know from the news report how much increase in activity there is. But but this increase appears to be significant as it got noticed by a group that was travelling in the area few days ago.

The group that did go there few days ago where from the Icelandic glacier research society. They did agree that they never had seen so much geothermal activity in the area. The inflation in Grímsfjall volcano is now more then it was before the eruption in 2004 according to the news. There is a good chance that the ML3.5 and ML4.2 earthquakes few days ago did change pathways in the ground and allowed the hot water to rise to surface in this location.

Thanks to Fireman to find this news.

Icelandic news about this. Use Google translate at own risk.

Mikill hiti í Grímsfjalli (mbl.is) – There is a picture in this news of the new geothermal activity.

127 Replies to “Increased geothermal activity in Grímsfjall volcano”

  1. @Jón:
    Looks like it is going this time, doesn’t it?
    All the pressure that is being released by the steaming cannot lead to other result. So I hope. 🙂

  2. If the magma wont find other paths. It seems like the plumbing under vatnajökull is complex enough for it. Strange seismicity between Grimsfjall and Bardarbunga for example…

    If the quake opened up this new path I guess another quake could just as easy close it and steer the magma in another direction. 🙂

    Now I tend to agree with you Renato especially since the inflation is quite big and if I would hazard a guess so is the strain. And there can be only so much strain before critical failure and then….”Thaaaar she blooows”…:)

  3. Little bit off-topic; a M7.4 quake struck S-W Pakistan, just 50km from a city of 15.000 people. My thoughts go to the victims…

    3. This quake occurred in the most remote and least populated area of Pakistan. MSNBC news site stated: The closest town to the epicenter was Dalbandin, with a population around 15,000 people, and is so remote that the nearby Chagai hills were the site of Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests.

  4. wow 7.4 is really big…

    And beneath Paris? That would be rather unusual wouldnt it?

    1. Yes, it has already been removed from the system, probably was a bug or something.
      According to the response-map at USGS city’s located at 530km distance have reported small structural damage. Imagine what happened to this 15k-populated-town 50km away from the epicenter…

      1. There are reports that the earthquake has even been felt in New Delhi, located at 1250km from the epicenter

  5. This is probably a very silly question but I’ve been following all the chat about activity under Grimsfjall and the strange link between there and Bardabunga. The really sciency stuff goes completely over my head though. Is there a real chance that if Grimsfjall goes that Bardabunga will follow and not in a mystical ‘volcanoes have their own agenda’ way?

      1. @Pieter:
        I was looking for the article which link you posted last week, didn’t find it but I thought Grimsvötn belonged to another fissure swarm, the one including Lakigar, right? Does it reach as far North as Bardarbunga? Wow!

      3. No problem hehe! Always nice to hear that comments are appreciated that much. 🙂 It is a very nice article though!

        The fissure swarms of Bardarbunga and Grimsvötn are indeed not related, but the central Volcano itself has unproven magmatic links I believe. Jón can probably give you a more detailed answer to this.

      4. They are 2 separate volcanic systems.
        BUT!!! They have far-reaching fissures running out from them.
        Think of the bike wheels with the rims removed, but with the spokes left. The hub are the central volcanos and the spokes are the fissures going out. Grimsfjöll and Bardarbunga bike-wheels have spokes that pretty much tickles their respective hubs. So when the Bardarbunga Hub had a large quake one of the Grimsfjöll spokes had a rapidly moving series of quakes that ran along the spoke up untill it reached the Gjalp part of the Grimsfjöll Hub (Caldera)… And then fo0llowed what in Dutch cycling is known as arsgespuiten.

        Perhaps Iceland should host Tour de Volcano?

      5. Arsgespuiten? Hahaha I’ve never heard of that, it sounds kinda nasty though, where did you get it from?

      6. It is the technical term for the effect on diverse Rabobank cyclists after eating raw chicken in sauce.
        The effects of it where seen on Tour de France in glorious detail. Diaorrhea on wheels 🙂

      7. Hahaha I think I understand what you were trying to type. Arsgespuiten means something like spray’s from the arse.

        Gah disgusting topic, let’s get back to geology. 😀

      1. My god of course! I should have thought of that.
        Quite amazing what the force of nature is. An earthquake in Pakistan is recorded in Iceland.. Just wow..

      2. Yes and I think it was recorded by Etna’s seismographs too, with a 10 min delay, correct, Jón?

      4. Okay I just found out that Theoretical P-wave travel time isnt affected by the magnitude of the quake. So 10 min is a little slow. Did notice the different timezones?

    1. Funny that the Grímsfjall quake happened around the same time.
      18.01.2011 20:27:54 64.400 -17.235 2.5 km 2.1 90.02 1.9 km ESE of Grímsfjall

    2. It’s UTC, which is almost the same as GMT, in Italy they have GMT+1. That explains the difference probably.

  10. Don’t be bothered about the strong signals on Hvammstangi (2) geophone station. I was testing it for errors earlier, but that explains the huge spikes it has. The spikes are going to clear out in the next 24 hours.

  11. 1.7 km 1.7 49.51 % quality 13.6 km NW of Grímsfjall

    Another quake at Grímsvötn.

    Hmm. The sound of one hand clapping badly?

  12. Tremors at GRF are increasing, but weather has been pretty much the same during the last 12-24 hours. Any ideas?

  14. @Lurking:
    I was bored yesterday after a 2 hour long presentation of the difficulty of finding spare parts to the worlds largest coal excavator. So I started to think about your conundrum with your favourite project.

    Since we have allready proved that they are doing some weird form of summing over the various m-scales I wandered over to how they probably are doing it. Problem is just that there are quite a few ways to do it that gives differing results. And since they do not answer mails (typical for icelandic authorities), I had actually asked them for the algorithm they are using, I instead started to think about the broader implication of what you are trying to do.
    Lets start at the beginning.
    What is determining the strength of a quake? It is the size of the movement area. The larger the area of the faulting the stronger the quake (simplified and I know you know this). Problem here is that nobody knows the actual fault size and calculate the strength from this, everyone does the opposite and calculate the fault plane from the magnitude since that is so much easier (see OT below).
    Problem with this method is that all measuring contains flaws due to equipment, conditions and soforth. So in every algorithm you tend to remove those flaws by inserting normalisation factors.
    So where does that leave you?
    Well, since you are seeing results after the automated system have done it’s warbling of the natures own warbling and a seismologist have warbled it a bit more you results that you do your calculations on. So the raw data you are using is not the actual raw data, it is instead a renormalized set of data that we have no way of knowing how it has been treated.
    So their plot might be anything from the raw raw data up to the same data you are using and anything in between. We cannot know what algorithms they are using, and we cannot know which way they do their summing over magnitude-scales. And remember, that it is not even to beginn with the fault planes they are basing it on, it is the other way around.
    So, where does that leave you?
    Well, there is no way in Fudge the Befuddleds underwear you can get your plot to look exactly the same as theirs. The mass of various ways they can differ is just to large.
    But… There is hope!
    I would say that it doesn’t matter. Why should you mimick their results? Let us say that they are using the same results as you are doing, then for all likelyhood it is the algorithm and renormalisation that throws it off, and those are just guesstimates to beginn with. Remember that they just want to see the trends, not the exact data since that is impossible.
    I wiould say that your way is probably as exact (or more) as theirs is on average, and by that merits a closer inspection and would be fun to compare to theirs.

    On a related matter (see above).
    The Grängesbergs mine had a fault plane in it, and from quake data they tried to calculate the size, topology and direction of the fault plane. Ten geologists used 2 years and all the latest equipment to do a map of the fault plane, producing the first computer map of an underground feature.
    Then they started doing a couple of hundred of drill-hole samples to see how close they where. Well, they where so far off in every possible way and the problem so vastly much larger than predicted that they closed down the most lucrative iron ore mine in existence.
    So, in a way they proved that it was impossible to do an accurate map of a fault plane judging from small quakes. And it still is.

    Picture of the blocking zone and a couple of the ore tipples.
    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Gr%C3%A4ngesberg-gruva.JPG

    2. Well, I appreciate the typos. As for grammatical mistakes a friend of mine relayed a headline he read yesterday “Lead Screws – Europe.” We spend a bit of time discussing whether they were talking about Pb or the leading purveyors of that activity. It was good for a snicker.

      Thanks for the pep talk. My goal is to set a box around areas of interest and to be able to produce a similar plot that we can then ruminate about. A sort of volcanophile salt lick.

      Due to scheduling… I have yet to have a block of time where I can sit down and run the most recent formula over the data.

  15. Someone mentioned that the levels of inflation had just passed the levels before the last eruption.
    Actually the levels passed a long time ago.
    The levels of the 2004 eruption was much higher than the levels before Gjalp, and the 2004 levels where superceded in mid 2007. The levels today is 200mm above previous highest recording (late 2004).

    What does that imply?
    From Gjalp in 1996 to the 1998 VEI-3 eruption it took only 2 years with a rapid inflation and a lot of quakes. The period from 1998 to the 2004 VEI-3 it took longer time and the inflation was very sharp in the beginning, then it levelled of and held steady for a long time and the governing factors seems to have been accumulated tensor strain.
    This time the inflation has been slow, steady and large. And the accumulated tensor strain shows the same pattern.
    My guess is that Grimsvötn is filled to the brim with magma, it might fill up a bit more, but that what is still lacking is a bit more accumulated tensor strain (quakes over time).

    Long term inflation:
    http://strokkur.raunvis.hi.is/~sigrun/GFUM.png

    Eruptive history:
    http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1703-01=&volpage=erupt

    Accumulated tensor strain:
    http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/vatnajokulsvoktun/grf_uppsafn.html

    1. My interpretation of this is that lady G. is heading for larger-than-average eruption. From the eruptive history it seems lady G. has frequently smaller VEI0-VEI2 (even VEI3) eruptions, and once in a while larger VEI4 or VEI4+ eruptions. It may be that the next one is not the larger one, but near in the geological future it is definitely coming. That kind of inflation cannot continue long until somebody’s in the need to release extra pressure somehow!

      1. If the fastest “climber” is really SKRO, then lady B. will have something to say in the future!

      2. I doubt that if there was any inflation near SKRO, that it would have been caused by uplift in Bardarbunga. SKRO station is about 50km away from the central volcano, and completely out of it’s volcanic system. SKRO is located near 2 other ancient volcanic systems, one of them is Tugnafellsjökull, but I doubt that these are inflating. There probably is a more obvious explanation for this data.

      3. If I would hazard a guess to the inflation it would be Hamarinn. It seems to be the closest volcano to that station.

      5. I think it’s not plausible that this deformation is caused by a magmatic in any volcano at all.
        Earthquake (swarms) do always accompany inflation and we haven’t seen any magma-related swarms in this area at all.

      6. Dear Jack,

        I’m not yet so scienced like you and others on this forum, allthough I’m learning everyday; but who is lady B.?
        I find this forum very interesting and hope I will be able to visit Iceland this year and will be able to watch a beautiful show by mother Nature! Have to buy a LaRo first, for the interior!
        To all scientistic forum writers: keep on writing!

        Kind regards,

        Henk Weijerstrasps

      7. Lady B. is Bardarbunga volcano. Many volcanologists tend to refer to volcanoes as “she”. I’m no professional volcanologist, but a amateur one.

      8. Icelandic volcanos are actually genderized, due to reasons of language, or that the volcanos have either male or female human names.

        Katla, Askja and Hekla are female names even for humans.
        Bardarbunga, Hengill, Theistareykjarbunga Thordarhyrna, Grimsvötn are male volcanos (Grim, Hengill and Thord are a human male names).
        Some volcanos are a bit more transvestitic though, like Krisuvik and Eyjafjallajökull for instance. Eyjafjallajökull simply means “Island mountain glacier”, not much gender in that, but we still call it Lady E, perhaps she/he is a shemale volcano? Hm, odd musings in the morning 🙂

      9. Pieter:

        “Earthquake (swarms) do always accompany inflation and we haven’t seen any magma-related swarms in this area at all.”

        In a perfect world, yes. With limited seismos and noisy weather (and other noise sources) the lack of definitive swarms does not mean that they aren’t there.

        Then there is the issue of just how ductile/brittle the rock is… which is affected by the rather large ice-load. Not to mention that there are already hinge points all over the place that that can accommodate the stress with very little complaint.

        Despite our best efforts, there is still a lot under that ice that we don’t know.

      10. Yes, I do agree with you on that, the point I was trying to make is that in order to have so much inflation, we should have seen anything over time, which is not the case.

      11. It is a vexing problem…

        Carl le Strange says:
        November 21, 2010 at 02:28

        …

        Question:

        How in the name of all unholy goose-feathers can we see these numbers without seeing other signs? The energy equivalent is high, very high. It equals a mag 4 per five days you know. Either the crust is really plyable there or something is wrong. And we should see something on the tremor plot. Movement like that should send out a continous chock-wave rumble.

        http://icelandgeology.net/?p=233

    3. There are no signs that Grimsvötn or Bardarbunga is going to have an unusually big eruption.

      It is normal for Grimsvötn to always inflate more than before for every eruption. It is just a part of the normal inflation of entire Iceland, currently iceland is inflated 80 metres above normal.
      The first and probably only sign of a large eruption in one of the 3 gigafissure erupting volcanos in “the silent zone” (cue horror movie music) is one quake between 7 and 8 when the fissure rips open, followed a few minutes later by large phreatic explosions when the ground water is hit by magma and the fire fountains will engulf a stretch of 10 km or more with more than 5000 cubic metres of lava pouring out per second, and gas able to kill in the millions if the winds are wrong. That was not scare tactics, that is just normal behaviour for “the silent zone”.
      For those who are new, the volcanos I am talking about that are producing these eruptions are Grimsvötn (Laki), Bardarbunga (Veidivötn), and Katla (Elgja). The names in parenthesis are the names of the most famous eruptions of said volcanos. These happen about every 600 years.
      There are 2 more volcanos capable of producing similar things, and that is Torfajökull (blamed to have ejected so much lava that it created the high tensility of the silent zone that it went and became stretchable enough fore a rubberband effect to be in place), and Askja. Of the last 2 Askja is pregnant with an eruption, we will see if it will be a central volcano eruption or a fissure eruption going toward Herdubreidartögl. Nota bene, Askja is not in the silent zone.

      1. That or somebody ran aground… catastrophically.

        …but something that big would have been on the news. 😉

  17. Hehe yes a mag 4.9 on the beach seems like a bug. Will be interesting to see it corrected though. Probably a small one near GOD as usual..

    1. Wednesday
      19.01.2011 13:18:06 63.616 -19.498 22.9 km 2.6 99.0 6.8 km S of Básar

  18. @Pieter, Carl, Lurking, Jack et al:
    I’ve been reading your recent reasoning on inflation/connections between Ladies B and G.
    Pieter said that there was no action taking place in Tungnafellsjökull to support Carl’s theories, but then Lurking replied, providing an interesting reasoning about it.
    Well, I’ve checked Jack’s comment on Dec 14th saying there had been indeed a M 1.8 quake to the NE of Tungnafellsjökull. And I also remember (but couldn’t find the link) a report in the IMO webpage about some kind of strange crack opening in the area, which was, then, classified as a “normal faulting occurrence”, if I can recall it right. That means that there IS some action there, or , in other words, Carl’s point has its grounds.
    And Pieter is right, there is a lot of stuff taking place under those jökulls.

    1. Forgot to mention the word Carl borrowed from Dutch and cycling to explain volcanic phenomena and immediately came to my mind “spatter cone”.
      I could not imagine a more appropriate word or expression to describe volcanic processes.
      This is poetry, Carl – science and arts coming close together. 😉

    2. It is all in the physics, we know the faultline moves with 5 cm annually in the worst possible way. Of course now and then a less ductile small part will crack and produce a small quake, but the majority of energy is continuosly stored in the high-tensile crust in the silent zone.

      To compare the silent zone with another well known feature. Imagine the San Andreas Fault smoking crack before going to a weird night-club in Berlin with a 280 year old constipation for some serious dancing, arsgesptuiten all over… 🙂

      @Renato:
      True poetry is to take a word and connect it with a natural phenomena like spatter cones. It is good to start the day with a laugh! 🙂

  19. And if this large inflation leads to a very large eruption? ………………………
    well…………………..
    How far away do we have to stand to be able to say…”You were right.” ?
    or maybe we don’t get too…….. 🙁
    How big are we thinking, Boys?
    (But knowing how many media read this site; perhaps we shouldn’t open that line of thinking. )
    Best!motsfo

    1. Well I don’t expect a major eruption to happen. The volcano had 6/7 years to refill the magma chamber which is not that long. I don’t think that’s enough for a really powerfull eruption. But who know’s what other forces have come to join the process. (such as stronger pressure from the moho?)
      All we can do is sit and wait. We can only make speculations, no one knows.

    2. If, and I really mean if…. a large eruption happens, well I would say that not even I am really safe.
      If it is Laki sized we would have between 5000 and 10000 cubic metres per second of lava fountaining out, with about 10 to 50 thousand tons per second of gasses ranging from CO2 to fluorinics and various sulphurides causing up to a million deaths and ontop of that you would have a couple of years without any summer. Last time around there where no crops in Europe for 2 years and none in the US for one year. Bleak be thy name.

      I have one even worse for those who wish so. Hekla having a caldera creationing collaps. Imagine a strong prolonged VEI-6 (think Pinatubo, but for a year or so) grounding all air-flight for a year, before the magma-reservoir explosively collapses in a final VEI-7 releasing 40 cubic kilometres of ejecta as a 8 by 10 caldera forms. This has allready happened in all of the other explosive volcanos in Iceland, so it would actually be only natural if it happened to Hekla to.

      “Beware of the dragon that gently sleeps on the slopes of mount Vesuvio”, famous last words from senator Plinius in a letter six months before it annihilated Heculeanum and Pompeii.

      1. Actually, now that you described the scene, I see that at least Katla and Bardarbunga have done it before (their caldera sizes match the 5 – 15 km range). And I guess, all the others with calderas of similar size have done it, too.

      2. Yes that is true, but keep in mind that all these volcanic systems with caldera’s are central volcanoes. Hekla is actually just one large fissure, the mountain itself was build by a succesion of fissure eruptions. I think Hekla is better compareable to the Laki-area. One central mountain (Laki, Hekla) and lot’s of parallel fissures. (Vatnafjoll, Lakigigar)
        (Now the big difference is that Laki ofcourse is (probably) part of a larger volcanic system and Hekla is a system on it’s own)

      3. Yes, they are two completely different birds, but one should remember that Hekla does have a central part that is a pre-caldera central volcano. But, as I wrote earlier, it would take something stupefying to make it go caldera on us. But so was also the case of all the others that have formed calderas.
        The last caldera forming event was Askja when it arsgespuited enough to produce the Viti lake.

      5. Viti is an explosion crater I believe, but yes that was the last caldera forming event indeed, but I think that the chance of future collapse is highest in the Katla volcano, or mayby even Grimsvötn. I would worry that much about Hekla, unless it still didn’t erup in 50 years from now. Hekla simply can’t have ‘reloaded’ enough in order to eject such volumes.

      6. Oh and in order to make a verb of “arsgespuiten” in the past it should be arsgespoten! 😀

      7. Katla is a stratovolcano that has already had a caldera formation event. I think the formation of the Katla caldera took place around 50.000 years ago. But I do not have it confirmed, so my number might be wrong.

      8. You are right, but that doesn’t say it can develop further? The fact that it has been (next to) dormant for the last 90 years could result in a larger than usual. This is not based on any scientific calculations but it’s just plain logics from an amateur. 😀

      9. One I-don’t-agree comment here: Volcanologists like to reminf pretty often that no-one knows how much eruptible magma there is, even though they may have good impression on the size of a magma chamber!

        Hence, I find it quite suspicious, when somebody “predicts with confidence” that the next one will not be major one, as there has not been not that much inflation during the last 5-10 years! In practice, he/she only knows about the last fart of a banana fly, when the animal below this fly’s feet has been dancing the whole day!

        And the one who does not know about history, will know nothing about the future!

      10. And the future tense of arsgesuiten as a verb would be..?

        Thanks for the arsgespoten.

        Hekla is pretty much in a continuos load-mode. It simply cannot inflate more. If memory serves it just falls a tad during eruptions, then tops off and goes back to rest.
        But, Hekla is not likely to do this, but it has probably been pretty close a couple of times when it had those year long VEI-6es.

      11. Well there we would face a small problem because Arsgespoten isn’t really a Dutch word. It looks like one, but it isn’t. You can rather use Aarsgespuit (Noun) Aarsspuiten (Verb, Infinitive) Aarsgespoten (Past)

        In order to make a future tense you should add (He/She/It will)Hij/Zij/Het zal aarsspuiten.

        Still aarsspuiten isn’t really a Dutch word, but I made it up from 2 different words:
        (Aars-arse) and (Spuiten-Spray/Squirt)

        Dutch for dummies!

      12. Actually I got hold of a cycling dutchman and he confirmed it to be a legitimate technical term in dutch cycling.
        He too pointed out that it should be “Aarsgespuiten”, not the single-a version I tried… 🙂

        And Aarsgespuiten is when one or two bikers hold a crapping biker propelling him while he craps “on the run”, not craps runningly.
        Ie, to not fall behind they do it while sitting on the bike while being propelled by the team-mates. The rumour of Rabobank cyclists eating raw chicken was just a rumour.

  20. Renato Rio is correct, I remember the piece about the “hey look, there’s a crack we haven’t seen” event. It was the North of Bárðarbunga off of a jeep trail if I remember correctly. Goose Lake / Pond?

    1. Yes, but I couldn’t find the source, though.
      It had been hanging over IMO’s news page for a while, but I think they’ve removed it.

      2. This is quite sure a sign of inflation (taking place below the crack). However, it may be debated which volcanic system this belongs.

      4. Yes, they say… I’ve also been in a forced position to say something else, when nobody of the big toes really wants to know the truth.

  21. Anyone know if they removed the camera definitely Mila
    frá yjafjallajökull Þórólfsfelli
    Greetings

    1. As far as I know, they didn’t. This might be due to bad weather and the darkness. The battery which powers this camera (and the network connection) is recharged with solar panels. If there is not enough light, it will run empty abd recharge at some point when there is better weather with more light.

      1. @Chris:
        Thanks for this info. I was already sorry for not having my daily nostalgic view of Lady E (you people don’t DARE to say she isn’t a she!) 🙂

      3. Sine of the Time

        [January 20, 2011 at 15:45]

        15:45 = 15.75

        15.75/24 = 0.65625

        0.65625 * 360° = 236.25°

        Sine (236.25°) = -0.831

  22. I have a question for you. I use different sites to follow the activity on the icelandic volcanoes. Two of them seems quite similar, but they dont show the same amount of quakes. For instance, for the area at Vatnajökull one of the sites says 3 quakes, and the other says 6? What is correct and which site is most reliable? It also seems like both sites are delivered by Icelandic met office, but with different addresses.

    1. Well… I can’t say why one would have 6 vs the 3 of the other. I can say that the data that shows up on the MET site has passed through an automatic detection system. As the data is reviewed by the geologists/seismologists, they re-interpret the waveforms and select the spots that best represent the data. Part of the issue, is that picking phases out of a waveform cant be ultra tricky unless you have a lot of experience at what you are looking at. That’s where the automated system get tangled up.

      On the MET site, as the quality number goes up, so does the confidence that the info is accurate. The 99.0 values are human reviewed and pass the sniff test. Anything less is an automated entry and is subject to change.

      What you may be seeing are different versions of the same data… just at different points of the review process.

    3. I got my start in electronics with analog circuits. The first intercept receiver I maintained and operated was tube based, and you had to read the parametric data directly from the traces on the scopes. It’s not seismology, but I understand the difficulty in picking out details.

      To give you an idea of what the seismologists are doing, and what sort of task the automated systems are trying to do, here is a figure from “Routine Data Processing in Earthquake Seismology With Sample Data, Exercises and Software” by Jens Havskov · Lars Ottemöller.

      First, a set of traces:

      http://i53.tinypic.com/23stdaf.png

      And in these traces, they determine which phase is which, and apply filters as needed to pull out frequency components… and I’m pretty sure they throw a Fourier Transform in there for good measure.

      Here are some of the ray paths that they are trying to pick out:

      http://i54.tinypic.com/2ppd3yt.png

      Now imagine trying to teach a computer and software to do that. It’s a pretty tough task. A set of human eyes is easier to teach, and with experience, I don’t think a computer can quite match the pattern recognition skill of someone trained in this craft. There is always something or a combination of somethings that the software designer never counted on. (Such as the epicenter being directly under the gear)

      That is one of the reasons that I have a high appreciation for what Jón Frímann and the people in seismological offices do. With out their love of the job there would be nothing for me to plot. This book, though I understand the concepts of what they are doing… takes a bit of work to digest.

      1. @Lurking:

        “(Such as the epicenter being directly under the gear)”

        They had thought about that, it is after all the second largest reason for there to be many measuring points. What no one had thought of was probably that having a quake right under a main station in a storm blocking out the sensitivity needed at all the rest.

        That is why I am tinkering with a 3-axial accelerometer combined with 3-axial gravitometer instead of the normal seismometer. Theoretically, if you had 2 of those at the site of GFUM and GRIM the difference of the 100 metres between them would have been enough to pinpoint it to within a meter and at the same time you would have seen if there was an influx of materials into the crust. Kind of swatting 2 flys on the go. Combine it with a ultra-low frequency array-microphone and you can map the mountain while your at it during a quake.
        Problem is not building it, problem is to make it sturdy enough and shrinking it.

    4. One site the Met uses, only shows +2R quakes, the other one shows all.

      Reliable ? Both 😉 just different approach

      1. Thank you both for exellent explanations!

        I dont have the greatest knowledge about volcanoes, earth tectonics and stuff like that, but the interest is huge, and that is a good place to start.

        I really appretiate this site, which always give good information backed up with good links and good discussions. Exellent job!

    1. 87 m/s?

      I’d say that’s a pretty good clip. Let’s hope it’s an error value, like the bank thermometers that read 284° on their signs.

      At 87 m/s there should be equipment being scoured off the mountain… and good luck finding the livestock.

  25. Hell in my arsgespoten… 147m/s in one enormous wind gust with 89 m/s average.

    Must have been a hell of a lot of flying sheep there coming in an attack-speed ranging from 334 to 551 kilometres an hour (209 to 334 mph).
    Pretty much all windstations in the area recorded winds over a cathegory 3 hurricane.

    1. Is the wind measuring station anywhere near anywhere an explosion could have occurred?

    2. sheep at over 300 miles per hour……….
      i wouldn’t want to get hit by one.
      i searched for conversion for miles per hour but couldn’t find one.
      How did You do that so quickly?
      Best!motsfo

  27. Its funny how when things go quiet on the volcano side, some of the group here descend into bovine scatology, flying sheep, conspiratorial green lizards and fricatives. My kinda trash 🙂

    1. Hmm… the only scatological reference that I have made recently.. (i.e. that I can recall) was on a text message to a friend on Long Island about Pāhoehoe lava. (looks similar in texture to what you might find in a stockyard)

      2. Well there ya go… the language barrier.

        I wasn’t in on that part of the discussion and I don’t have to worry about unexplained interception of my text messages. Not that there is anything special about them.. other than me griping about a fast food clerk who hears “tuna fish” in the phrase “BMT on wheat.”

  28. Just ask Google: “147 m/s in mph”, and it gives the answer:
    147 (meters / second) = 328.829635 mph
    That’s the fastest/easiest way to do it.
    Otherwise, multiplying m/s by 3.6 gives km/h; dividing that by 1.609 gives mph.

    1. yeah… and we just had a full moon……… and as the moon wanes we usually pick up a few. i’ve watched earthquakes before the internet… The internet sure makes it easier! i’ve got lots of little theories about earthquakes and
      love hearing stories from the people who went thu the ’64 quake in Alaska.
      Just missed it ….. got here in the summer of ’64. But we were having lots of aftershocks and not all the effects were gone yet. Off to google fricatitives.
      And Thanks, Kultsi! i accutally got out my address book and wrote the formula down… i mean my REAL Address book, the cloth bound one with flowers on the outside and all the important dates of passed relatives and other stuff i really want to keep. Computers go down, man.
      Thanks… i will be running a little reference ticket for myself with that….
      Often i read “suchandsuch” m/s and i say “Yes but WHAT is that!”
      i’m kinda into the weather too.
      and it does look like a dragon.
      Best!motsfo

      2. MotsFo:
        You are just unique!
        It would be a thrilling experience to see your cloth bound address book with all those flowers! And thanks for the phonetical reference. I had already forgotten all about the fricatives.

  30. I am living close to that weather station in south Iceland. At that time, circa 5pm, there was a big snow shower with blizzard conditions with very strong gusts. Just from what I saw yesterday, I would say surely the gusts were higher than 100 km/h (I don’t have any wind instrument here), the station’s 212km/h still seems very high, but who knows maybe it really happened.

    Similar wind gusts have been recorded on that station on the last couple of weeks, exactly in periods when very strong wind gusts also occurred here. 😀

    1. That’s actually quite sane.

      I think where the shock is coming from is in the units.

      87 m/s ≈ 313.2 kp/h

      That puts it up into the realm of record wind speeds. Not impossible… just really rare. I’ve spent about 3 hours in sustained 185 kph winds and stuff does start to come apart. As comedian Ron White states: “It’s not THAT the wind is blowing, it’s WHAT the wind is blowing…”

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_speed

  31. Jón, I was wondering, there seem to be small earthquakes now and then around Reykjavik, this suggests that there is an active fault near the city. Would that give the possibility that ever, somehow there could be a medium-large quake (M5+) near Reykjavik? Because if there is a fault, it probably is a strike-slip fault like SISZ.

    1. The earthquakes close to Reykjavík are most likely construction explosions or some other type of rock related activity (for roads etc..). This is human activity in most cases.

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