Posted on by Jón Frímann

Geologist worry about earthquake activity in Kistufell field (Bárðarbunga volcano)

In my last blog post I did tell the news about the possibility about a eruption in the Kistufell volcano field. But that field is a part of Bárðarbunga volcano system and has a lot of earthquake activity since the beginning of earthquake recording in Iceland.

In the tonight news on Rúv about this area, Páll Einarsson geologist at University of Iceland says in the news on Rúv that there is a good reason to worry about this area. As it is one of the most active one in Iceland, but it is directly above the mantle plume under Iceland. Páll Einarsson also says in the news on Rúv that before the eruption in the year 1996, that took place in a volcanic ridge now named Gjálp there was a increase in earthquake activity in Kistufell field.

But due to continues earthquake activity there is it hard to know what is exactly going on there. Páll Einarsson also says in the news on Rúv that it is a problem that this area of Iceland lacks the proper coverage with seismometers. But they are few in this area and that makes it harder to detect the depth and the location of the earthquake that take place in this area of Iceland.

After the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption in the year 2010. It seems that geologist in Iceland take earthquake swarms more seriusly then they did before. As they did learn from Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption that not all volcano start with few earthquakes just before they erupt, as is common with few volcanoes in Iceland.

The news from Rúv on this matter. Use Google Translate to understand.

Full ástæða til að hafa varann á (Rúv.is)

73 Replies to “Geologist worry about earthquake activity in Kistufell field (Bárðarbunga volcano)”

  1. I signed up for USGS ENS (Emergency Notification System) which sends emails when quakes occur. I didn’t get notified for the 3.3 Sunday, 07:51:25. If I remember, someone posted that USGS only registers quakes >= 4.0. Is this correct?

    I would like to get a more timely notification of any quakes larger than 3.0 in Iceland. Is there a public notification service in Iceland similiar to the USGS ENS system that one can subscribe to? Thanks in advance!

    1. In about 1 month or so I will be releasing my data collection program which currently gets USGS, EMSC and GeoNet (New Zealand) data, and I have all the basics of an Icelandic collection done.

      This program also can download seismograph plot and maps etc (I download the Iceland maps and graph every hour)

      I am afraid it is only a Windows program, but it runs a Windows service and collects all data every 5 minutes. There is a desktop alert that lets you know about new quakes.

      If you are interested let me know here. The program is free by the way.

      http://qvsdata.wordpress.com/qvs-data-registration/

    1. That’s nice, Anne.
      However, as I registered, I could only get notification of earthquakes starting with a strenght of 3.
      The map shows the others, that’s not the problem, but as far as I could see the notification started higher. (maybe because there are so many aerthquakes?)I still registred and will see what happens. ( and yes, I did understand correctly, as my mothertonque is Dutch *s*)

    2. Dear Anne,
      I am also subscribed to the site you mention above; in fact I mentioned this site some blogs ago and got a nice reaction from Starwoman.
      I visited the owner of the site ( Paul Kornaat) last august and had a very enjoyable “Iceland evening”. He showed the video he made, last march, of the Fimmvorduhals eruption, which as you know was the forerunner for the more explosive eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull.
      Just bought a Landrover Defender last saturday to be able to cross the Icelandic highlands!
      Kind regards / Vriendelijke groeten (ook aan Starwoman),

      Henk Weijerstrass

  3. Well, here we are… two bruisers and the associated hangers on that are ready to rumble, itching for a fight. (Bárðarbunga, Grimsvötn, Hamarrin, that dis-interested daughter volcano south of Grimsvötn that I am not even going to try and transliterate, and Askja prancing around up in the corner screaming “me too!!”)

    So, a quick history lesson in graphic form. Nothing really new here for regular visitors but it can serve as a quick reference for what has happened in the last year or so.

    One year quake history, plan view of the area… color denotes days before present.

    http://i54.tinypic.com/2ry2hs5.png

      1. I’m not sure if you are expressing displeasure with it or not.

        I lost a drive last week that had my shape files of the area and haven’t had time to do a recovery on it. So, no DIVA Gis map for the time being. (should have had it on the network drive anyway)

      2. 5 (out of the normal 5) stars wouldn’t be displeasure, would it ?

        Beautiful pic as always

      3. @the 2 lurking lurkers:
        In american culture it is normal to put stars “*” to mask where you intended to insert your favourite bad word. In north european culture it is put as a way of make a grade, ie. 5-star in this case.

      4. Well… there is no real format… at least as far as I know. I generally use the #$% sort of characters, but you have to be careful of the “at” sign since some software will try to think it’s an E-mail address. My habit of doing it comes from the way profanity was represented in comics or political cartoons.

        As for stars, yeah, I’ve seen them used. This uncertainty is what caused my confustion.

        My question was whether or not it was a good profanity or a bad profanity. The F word has more connotations than most other words.

        In general, the number of characters represent the number of characters in the targeted forbidden word.

        Now that you have elaborated upon the meaning, I’m glad you liked it.

        😀

    2. Thanks Mr. Lurk. Very illuminating. Show the sharing pattern between B and G well in the last 25 days. Nice Plot.

    3. I wonder if you have the data to make a similar plot of the time preceding the Gjalp event?

      Browsing the EQ plots preceding http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/viku/1996/vika_40/index.html suggests that there was very little EQ activity there before action and Gjalp just came more or less out of blue. Now the region is undergoing fairly constant rumble – but does it make an eruption more or less likely?

      1. I have a flat file listing of all of those quakes.

        Later today I can do the same graphic with a years data leading to the 1996 event. R/L stuff has to be done first since I have to catch up with loosing a work day by falling off of a truck on Friday.

      2. “Falling of a truck on friday”…
        That doesn’t sound to good, Lurking! Hope you are well.

      3. Eh, I’ll limp for a while but I’ll be okay. My main concern on the way down, other than not hitting anything important (head, neck, shoulder etc…) was to get spun around as soon as I could in order to get an eye on where the 200 lbs of equipment was going to land. Though important, unless I could scramble back up before it teetered the best bet was to not be were it was going. One thing I learned quickly in the Navy is when something big is on the move, don’t be there. (I actually watch a salad bar chase a guy across the galley once… he dove/fell down a hatch and the salad bar gave up the chase)

        Anyway…

        Here is that same graphic. with the 2 years of quakes leading up to the 1996 eruption plotted along with it as triangles.

        http://i53.tinypic.com/f224bk.png

        And no, there weren’t a lot of quakes before that eruption.

        The day scaling of both the dots and triangles is the same. Dots are days before present, and the triangles are days before the 1996 eruption. (9/30/1996 per http://www.volcano.si.edu)

      4. Lurk:
        How can you manage to conciliate the hard field work and the overnight task of plotting? Don’t you get any sleep at all?
        No wonder you ended up falling off from the truck.
        Take some sleep, man, and be safe, because I think we are up to something interesting in Iceland, and you will be needed hereafter.

      5. Really important are the quakes (red dots) which form almost a straight line from barbadunga towards grimsfjall.

        also quite interesting are the blue triangles which do also form some kind of a line, maybee dike related quakes? hard to tell anyway.

        thank you lurking for this new plot! it´s allways nice to get quakes visualised in this way : )

      6. You know, to confess, I really don’t come here to read about Volcano’s and such. I come here to read all the colorful stories of Salad Bars Chasing Sailors, the varied and interesting forms of flatulence, Conspiratory Green Lizards, the end of the world, etc. etc. The human component is far more interesting that a few boring quakes and watching geology move with time. j/k

      7. I fell off the truck because it was cold, raining, and I got stupid. The people who designed the gear put little cheap arse plastic wheels on it that you can’t lock, and they made it too da@n heavy and ungainly to be able to get ahold of it with a hand tuck. There are any number of reasons why I fall off of the truck

        As for the plotting, it’s a leisure activity. The hard part is getting the data into a manageable form on a consistent basis. Now that I have a full set of data, its just a matter of updating it. On a plus side, since I no longer have to hit up the MET site every day to get data or risk loosing it, things are much easier now.

        Those blue triangles are slap-dab in the middle of Hamarinn, the daughter volcano to Bárðarbunga (sits in Bárðarbunga’s fissure swarm)

        If you not the arc from Hamarinn to Grimsvotsn, the quakes over the last few years make an trex from a diffuse group in Hamarinn, up shallower to the bend and then drop back down into Grimsvotn. I can’t help but thing that there is something to that shape. Interestingly, that pattern was there before the ’96 event.

        Here is an idea… it has no merit other than I thought of it. (and, have had no coffee yet)

        In ’96 there may have been magma sharing from Bárðarbunga to Grimv… or it may have just been Bárðarbunga’s magma that happened to have popped out near Grimsv. (their dikes do intermingle)

        What if Hamarinn, a daughter of Bárðarbunga is acting as a sort of overflow reservoir for Grímsvötn? Both Thordarhyna and Hamarinn have this pattern of quakes treking up to the caldera area of Grímsvötn. In Grímsvötn proper, there is a zone of almost no quakes once you get down below a couple of kilometers. To me.. that points to rock that is more plastic and able to bend to the stresses. (less quakes) And from the top of this region, quakes occur and tend to trek down into the two daughter volcanoes.

        Eh… just an idea.

      8. @Lurkings theory of overflow magma-reservoir-extra-volcanos, hm, we gotta make a better name of that. Ah, LOMREV-theory (Lurkings theory of Overflow Magma Reservoir Extra Volcanos).

        If I understood LOMREV correctly we have surplus lava running from Grimsvötn to at least Hamarinn.
        It is actually quite close to what I have been thinking. My idea was quite simply that we are basically talking about 2 volcanic systems that over time have grown together.
        Over time both Grimsvötn and Bardarbunga have developed fissures and volcanic systems with sub-volcanos. My idea was that those systems inter-sected and even have grown into each other on the fringes.
        What I missed is that if you have two pressure systems with independent feeders of energy you sometimes get lows and highs at the same time, and then overflows that cannot go anywhere. My idea was that Gjalp was such an instance, with both Bardarbunga and Grimsvötn being fully inflated and then it erupted in Gjalp with magma from both.
        What I did not think of was what is happening when there isn’t sufficient pressure, or leading up to a Gjalp style eruption. It makes a hell of a lot of sense that it needs magma-depots somewhere near the point of intersection.
        After thinking about the LOMREV-theory I find that it has a lot of merit to it.

        Sadly most of the lavas from those 2 volcanic systems are not readilly available at the intersection point(s), so we cannot easily study the composition. The samples of B and G point to differences in chemical markers, but at for instance Gjalp, we perhaps would see an intermingling of the chemical markers. A sample of that lava would then prove half of LOMREV, the interconnection bit. The other bit could be proved by samples from the last eruption of Hamarinn, since if it is a true LOMREV-depot than it should contain magma from both parent-volvanos.
        Problem is just all that dang ice, but reallity is hard, we should be able to just go and pick a piece in a not to far of future at the current de-glaciation.

        Good one Lurking!

        All of the spelling errors and thingamabits are on the house and due to cramping under-arms.

  4. And, going back and grabbing the two Mag 3+ events to see where they sit in relation to the rest of the show:

    http://i56.tinypic.com/25i7nmd.png

    It seems to me… lest I messed it up, that these two aren’t directly tied in with the odd-ball lineament of quakes from the two main volcanoes. Matter of fact, they don’t even lie on the region headed up to Askja.

    The lineament is notable only from the point that in the past, significant quake activity at Bardabunga ended with an eruption near Grimsvotn. Magma may have migrated down a dike and popped out there. I’ve mentioned this before, and it was pointed out that that is just one of a few ideas of what may have happened. They are, after all, buried under copious amounts of ice and do not easily give up their secrets.

  5. Yes, odd – perhaps magma in the expected areas is pushing the rock and the earthquakes are where the ground cracks when compressed sideways by rising magma some distance away.

  6. Here is a viewer with atlas maps showing whether the earth is covered with lava, sand or other surfaces. Also cliffs and cracks better visible than in the satellite images.
    http://atlas.lmi.is/kortasja_en/
    I think this can be useful for our friends visualising Icelandic geology from abroad.

    3. I agree with Starwoman and Lurkin, Dagur: very clear map! You live in Iceland?
      Kind regards,

      Henk Weijerstrass (Zwaag, Holland)

    4. i’ve bookmarked this site a short time ago. it really is an incredible site with stunning satelite images. i’ve started to scout a route for my trekking tour in 2012, hopefully there is no big eruption which makes my route unpassable.

    5. Good information. Now know where roads are in relationship to temors or stations. Or why its difficult to travel to some of the volcanic areas. This is the BEST site.

  7. Thanks for the news Jón but I don’t understand this particular statement: “But they are few in this area and that makes it harder to detect the depth and the location of the earthquake that take place in this area of Iceland.”

    If there are a “few”, why is it “harder to detect..”? Do they interfere with each other?

    1. There are only few seismometers in this area, since they need to sit on solid rock, which is kind of difficult on a glacier. So a lot of seismometers have been placed around Vatnajökull, but they are pretty far away from the “hot spot”, so they miss some information.

      1. as far as i understand it correctly, it is very hard to correctly calculate how deep those quakes happen. They have the same problem with the quakes originating from Goðabunga because those quakes seem to have very low frequencies. It might be the same problem for the area around Kistufell. Also the large distance to the epicenter of the quakes makes it difficult to locate earthquakes with a low magnitude.

    2. For getting a good detection in the 2-axis (north, east and depth) you need at least 3 different SIL-stations picking up the quake. Problem here is that we have a very good one at Grimsvötn sitting on a nice juicy rock.
      That one takes up all quakes nicely, but the problem is that although it is very good at determining strength, it needs two more stations to determine direction if it happens close to it. That is normally possible, but the problem is mostly the depth-factor since then it then need SILs fairly close, and at various heights. If all the recordning SILs are at the same height it is much harder for the system to calculate depth.

  8. Haha Google translate really abuse some languages. 🙂

    “Det är dock svårt att säga om skalvet nu orsakas av vulkanutbrott, eller om regionen är att tillämpa en räntesänkning. ” This is one of the sentences from the article above. In english that would something like:

    “however it is hard to tell if the EQ is caused by a vlocanic eruption or if the region applies a reduction in interest rate”

    Well that confirms it..Volcanoes do have an interest in the world of banking. 😉

    1. Thanks for the link! wouldn’t have found it by my self because i don’t check the iceland review page that often 🙂

  11. Yes I live in Reykjavík and have traveled a lot in the highlands, both summer and winter, and very interested in geology.
    I have spent some weeks of my summer holidays to GPS map mountain tracks, cooperation 4X4 club with LMÍ, National Land Survey of Iceland.
    And to others: glad to be at help.

  12. Lurking good advice to any one working around heavy unattached objects. I had a nasty surprise once when fighting a fire in my old DC-7(four engine Douglas airliner.) Being Co-pilot one of my duties was to SECURE all objects, toolkits, parts, and oil drums. Ok, I did, what I wasn’t aware of was the ground crew had changed the drum out and just hooked the straps on and did not tighten them . Airborne, we went to a
    hot little fire on the Oregon coast NW winds and nasty turbulence we worked for most of the day. got back to base (Medford, Oregon.) and I discovered the drum. The full 55gal.oil drum. not attached to the floor. I made sure that sucker was cinched down..

    Dagur- that is a great reference got it bookmarked for future (maybe near) reference…

    1. The giggle version of the article in DV.is

      If this continues to evolve like this and the quakes become more shallow we might see an eruption, “says Sigurlaug Hjaltadóttir, geophysicist at the Icelandic Meteorological Office. Increased seismicity has been in the northwest have glacier recently. Sunday night and Sunday morning showed two earthquakes south of Kistufell, one 3.3 on the Richter scale the other 3.1. Last week there were numerous small earthquakes.

      Sigurlaug said in an interview with DV that for the past months there has been increased seismic activity in the northwest part of the glacier. “There are seismic cycle there and Bárðarbunga’s active volcano,” she says and adds that in recent weeks and months have particularly focused on Grímsvötn for a possible volcanic eruption. After the glacier water run, in Grímsvötn last October, the seismic activity reduced, bit is on the increase again.

      Sigurlaug says that it is difficult to ascertain the proceedings for now. The earthquakes are deep down (still remember how difficult it is to measure up there, through the ice) and just as likely that nothing happens.

      “These are small quakes of considerable depth, perhaps ten km. There are clips swarm but currently does not imply that this is anything else. There was a similar cycle at the end of last year and it was even more effective, “says Sigurlaug but notes that there is always an increased risk when activity increases in active volcanoes. “There is nothing you can do but just watch these events” says Sigurlaug.

      1. It is not monitored through the ice. The SIL at Grimsfjöll is located on a rock-outcropping (Nunatak) sticking up out of the glacier.
        The depth-locationing is due to the distance to the sub-measuring points and the sameness of height of those. The degree of angle will then be very low and to get an accurate read then you normally have 2 SILs at different depth.

        There is a solution to this though. You can calculate the speed-differences between the sub-SILs (time difference between recording), from those subsystems you then calculate the speed in media and then you get a very precis location and time-point of the earthquake, then you just subtract the Grimsfjöll-SILs time of interception and you have the depth.
        But… this requires 3 things.
        1. An atomic clock hooked up to get the time-measurment exact enough.
        2. A fair knowledge of the permeability factor for sound at a specific frequency through the media (rock) between Grimsfjöll and the sub-SILs.
        3. Fibre-optic interconnectors or permanent radio-connectors. Satellites just don’t cut it since they intersect with their own timeing problems…

        So, it is easier to have more SILs inside Vatnajökull, but then we need more Nunataks, and those haven’t emerged yet. But at this rate of deglaciation they probably will sooner than later.

  14. @RonF, Re: Salad Bars and Sailors

    The part about that story that gets unreal, is that we were in some pretty nasty weather at the time. The welds on the salad bar snapped and took off after the guy, lettuce and carrots flying all over the place as his tray shot up into the air and he fled. About the time he drops out of sight we hear a blood curdling scream… but it came from the other end of the galley in the forward passageway. (hallway leaded towards the front of the ship). It seems that the soda machine had also snapped a weld and was precariously leaning on the bulkhead (wall) on the other side of the passageway… with the guy who screamed crawling out from under where he was very nearly crushed.

    That evening they didn’t even try to cook dinner… the weather got so bad that they just passed out sandwiches.

  15. @all, moved this down since I found Lurkings theory important:

    @Lurkings theory of overflow magma-reservoir-extra-volcanos, hm, we gotta make a better name of that. Ah, LOMREV-theory (Lurkings theory of Overflow Magma Reservoir Extra Volcanos).

    If I understood LOMREV correctly we have surplus lava running from Grimsvötn to at least Hamarinn.
    It is actually quite close to what I have been thinking. My idea was quite simply that we are basically talking about 2 volcanic systems that over time have grown together.
    Over time both Grimsvötn and Bardarbunga have developed fissures and volcanic systems with sub-volcanos. My idea was that those systems inter-sected and even have grown into each other on the fringes.
    What I missed is that if you have two pressure systems with independent feeders of energy you sometimes get lows and highs at the same time, and then overflows that cannot go anywhere. My idea was that Gjalp was such an instance, with both Bardarbunga and Grimsvötn being fully inflated and then it erupted in Gjalp with magma from both.
    What I did not think of was what is happening when there isn’t sufficient pressure, or leading up to a Gjalp style eruption. It makes a hell of a lot of sense that it needs magma-depots somewhere near the point of intersection.
    After thinking about the LOMREV-theory I find that it has a lot of merit to it.

    Sadly most of the lavas from those 2 volcanic systems are not readilly available at the intersection point(s), so we cannot easily study the composition. The samples of B and G point to differences in chemical markers, but at for instance Gjalp, we perhaps would see an intermingling of the chemical markers. A sample of that lava would then prove half of LOMREV, the interconnection bit. The other bit could be proved by samples from the last eruption of Hamarinn, since if it is a true LOMREV-depot than it should contain magma from both parent-volvanos.
    Problem is just all that dang ice, but reallity is hard, we should be able to just go and pick a piece in a not to far of future at the current de-glaciation.

    Good one Lurking!

    All of the spelling errors and thingamabits are on the house and due to cramping under-arms.

  16. Grimsvötn:
    Sigrúns GPS plot (GFUMstutt) is out, and it shows that the current changes in the GPS plot is ice…
    http://strokkur.raunvis.hi.is/~sigrun/GFUMstutt.png

    So, not much fun going on movement-whise… or..?

    But…

    Suspense…

    When we look at the long-term it gets really interesting.
    GFUM has been moving evenly south since the 2004 eruption, the east movement has also been consistent. And UP is always UP at Grimsvötn untill he erupts (Grim is a male name…).
    So, a couple of months ago the motion-pattern changed, and is now very clear. The long-term plot down below is de-iced.
    The normal movement to the north is gone, now it is sharply being pushed to the south and west instead of east.
    And that is a sign of a fast inflation to the south-west of GFUM that has been going on for about 2 months. It has all been hidden by the GFUM being iced over many times. But the current trend is clear.
    http://strokkur.raunvis.hi.is/~sigrun/GFUM.png

  17. There is a bad storm about to hit Iceland. The peak is going to be around 22:00 UTC. Wind speed is expected to top 30m/s and is even going to peak higher then that.

  18. Funny that… the wife was just reading USA Today (yech) and they are saying that a cold front dropping in soon will put wind chills in the -30°F range…. in the Texas Panhandle.

    Sure, it gets cold out there in winter… but wind chills of 30 below? In Texas?

    1. Ah, fiddleee dee, that nothing. In 1783 the water in the Gulf of Mexico partially froze and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers froze along with pretty much the entire north eastern U.S. Remember why? I hope Lady B or K doesn’t try to compete with Lady L.

      About 8-9 months ago, I heeded the words of commodity analysts and bought wheat and corn futures and also stocked up on bulk food while it was cheap. I now have easily 6 months of food. And thats to say nothing of the power of volcanos and the possibility of increased activity in the coming years.

      1. Smart move. I have been working on old skill-sets that my parents took for granted. Such as baking bread from scratch, making beer, canning etc.

        Ever hear of two researchers named Livingston and Penn? They have been studying and keeping track of Zeeman splitting inside the cores of sunspot over a period of several years.

        Zeeman splitting occurs in the spectral lines of certain elements in the presence of a magnetic field. The element in question is iron. Based on the current running trend, they estimate that by about 2015 the magnetic field inside the flux tubes that make the sunspots, will not be strong enough to evacuate the tube of plasma. (≈1500 Gauss) When this happens there will be no sunspots.

        The part about it that they can’t decide on, is if this is some normal variation coupled with the periodic sunspot cycles, or if it’s something occurs on a longer trend and they just happened to have detected it. Either way, each and every new sunspot that has shown up in Cycle 24 has fit the running trend of steadily decreasing magnetic fields. If you will note over at spaceweather.com, when they get excited over a new spot… it’s typically a diminutive little bugger… and we are easily into the second year of this cycle. Some of those spot that are being counted would never have been seen 100 to 150 years ago. Wolf number or not. This is just another aspect of the technology skew that I usually mention. (see? I did it again)

        Anyway… here is a non -quake graph that can give you a handle on how Cycle 24 compares with all of the other recorded sunspot cycles. It’s… well, anemic.

        http://i51.tinypic.com/2n8pjtl.jpg

        Now.. what I really came to post about.

        I spent part of the evening reconstructing my shape files for the behemoths under the ice, only to realize after I was done that I had transposed two digits when geo-referencing the source map… after I had constructed all of the shapes. That’s what you get when you get in a hurry.

        So… I’ll just use the actual background map as a reference instead. I cut back on the contrast so that it’s markings would be less distracting to the earthquake patterns. This is the same one year data set in my last post, sans the 1996 data.

        It appears that Grimsvotn’s sibling Thordarhyna isn’t as much into play as I thought. The quakes trending that way seem to terminate in one of the calderas of Grimsvotn. Thordarhyna has had a few quakes, but it’s piecemeal compared to Hamarinn.

        Anyway.. here be the graph: (Note, red = 10 km or greater, bright green 3 km or less. Everything else is in between.) Background source image is “Volcanic systems and calderas in the Vatnajokull region, central Iceland: Constraints on crustal structure from gravity data”

        http://i51.tinypic.com/2z9li54.png

      2. @Lurking:
        I really think you should use this map on the “from above” plots. I gave an image of the land that made things much clearer for me, and I would guess for most others of us who are not Icelanders. I now see things clearer:)

        Okay, some comments on what we see now that I see clearer… Keap in mind that one should never over-interpret the importance of quakes like I do below. They are important, but there are other factors too.
        1. Judging by the quake patterns Hamarinn is not a son-volcano of Bardarbunga, instead it is the son of Grimsvötn. It still probably today is infused now and then from Bardarbunga according to LOMREV, and is a focal deposit for the possible interconnection between Grimsvötn and Bardarbunga.
        2. There seems to be good evidence of the triple-junction part of LOMREV, when looking at the quake-patterns.
        3. It seems like the currently most likely part of Grimsvötn to erupt is right below, or slightly to the south-west of GFUM-station.
        4. Bardarbunga seems to (at least for the moment) end to the north-east of Kistufell, with both working as focii, probably Kistufell works as a deposit-reservoir for Bardarbunga in style with LOMREV.
        5. There seems to be no evidence of any connection between Bardarbunga and Askja. Either the material in between is so tensile that it works as a quake-absorbent, or the rifting takes part at another place.
        6. There seems to be either a connection between Kverkfjöll and Askja, or rifting taking place there according to 5.
        7. Esjufjöll looks promising for the future.
        8. Thordarhyrna seems “sleepy”. It seems like it is not a part of any LOMREV-connection with Grimsvötn, or it is a dormant LOMREV-depot. But, there seems to at least have been some sort of connectivity back in the days of Laki.

        The more I look at your image Lurking, the more I see either two volcanos interconnected, or one very very large volcano with so many different magma-reservoir systems that it can happily produce different magmas by internal processing.
        And in a way looking at it as one hyper-volcano makes sense. We have the magnetic and gravitetic anomaly that indicates one massive feeder-system powered by the hotspot. Also, as someone said, Vatnajökull pretty much has the lava-output equaling the Siberian trap-formation. Perhaps it is a trap-forming hypervolcano we see, happily going about its buisiness building up the land below the ice. But I am speculating here, we would need more rock samples and stuff to be certain either way.

      3. I just noticed that the cycle 24 graphic may not render correctly in all browsers. It carries a jpg extension but is a png file. This is a properly named version of the same graphic. Apologies to all if it didn’t’ render correctly.

        http://i53.tinypic.com/2lwwxmg.png

      4. Thanks for the cycle plot. “Anemic” you say but will we have more than the occasional problems with wireless devices, etc etc like some scientists have reported as “possible”?

      5. Anything is “possible,” the issue is with what is probable.

        I’ve seen dire warnings about increased solar activity wither down to “about normal” to something akin to a Dalton by NASA’s projection of what solar max will come in at.

        Point of fact is that they don’t know. Period.

        The much pointed at Carrington event happened on the backside of an otherwise average cycle. It was strong enough to cause arcing and fires in TELEGRAPH stations. You know, nothing more complicated than wires on poles hooked up to a relay, a battery, and a key. It takes quite a bit of current to push a voltage that high .. and it was induced by the geomagnetic storm going on at the time.

        But otherwise, it was a normal cycle. The epitome of average.

        Whenever I hear experts make projections that are not backed by physical data or logical theory… I try not to laugh.

        Can it happen? Sure. Is it likely? Not by what I’ve seen.

      6. gawd it’s flipping late..

        I mis-spoke on the depths… red is 3 km or less, green is 10 km or greater.

        $%^$!!

      7. This is precisely “why” I wonder about the lack of concern and participation regarding the seismic activity on Iceland. Meaning that it could (likely will) affect the USA. Doesn’t NASA have equipment that can monitor and record seismic activity on glaciers? Can’t the type of instruments that they’ve used on the Moon and on Mars be used in Iceland? Seems that they would hold up well in extreme temperatures, high wind and storms.

      9. This might be a bug in WordPress 3.0.5 that I am currently using.

        I do not know why this bug might be happening. But if this continues. I am going to turn off threaded replays.

      11. Simple answer, no.
        First of all you need to have a media through which the waves created by the quake can travel through. And to paraphrase my favourite movie Alien, “In space nobody can hear you scream”. Why, well there is vacuum there so nothing can propagate what is basically a sound-wave.
        Second of all, NASA is pretty much defunct now due to budget-cuts.
        Third, the ice is not the problem since the SILs are not located on the ice. The problem is funding. Due to the distance the SIL ontop of the Nunatak (rock-formation) at Grimsvötn is expensive since it needs to generate it’s own electricity and soforth. They haven’t been able to fully expand the GRIM-station that is located a few hundred metres away from GFUM-station. If they did, the problem would be solved. The gradient-separation would then be enough to pinpoint depth.
        GFUM = SIL + continous GPS
        GRIM = GPS station that is not continous, it has to be hand-checked, and is used as a reference for GFUM only. It needs to be changed into continous GPS and needs to have a SIL unit installed. But it would cost a lot. In a perfect world it would also get a borehole tensile strainmeter too, but… Money.

        So, the solution is much simpler then everybody thinks, but… Money… (Pink Floyd-moment from Dark side of the Moon).

  19. Presently, there are no signs of an imminent volcanic eruption in Iceland. The Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) did not issue a warning last weekend in connection with increased seismicity beneath the Vatnajökull ice-cap. If signs of an eruption were apparent, IMO would issue a warning immediately.

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