Posted on by Jón Frímann

Strong earthquake swarm in Bárðarbunga volcano

Yesterday (30.01.2017) there was exactly one week (article here) since last earthquake activity in Bárðarbunga volcano. In this weekly activity there is an emerging pattern, that pattern is that earthquake magnitude is growing. Number of earthquakes happening in each swarm has not increased that I have noted (at the moment at least). Magnitude 4,3 earthquake moves the fault few mm upward in this case. Those millimetres have now started to add up. I don’t know what the inflation currently is due to lack of GPS data at the moment.


The earthquake activity in Bárðarbunga volcano. Copyright of this image belongs to Icelandic Met Office.

Latest earthquake swarm had magnitude (in the order they happened), magnitude 4,3, magnitude 4,1, magnitude 3,4. Depth of this earthquake swarm was also slightly different, being from 9,4 – 8,3 km. It is difficult to know for sure what is going on at this depth, magma might be creating path for it in the crust on its way to the surface or this simply might just be the fault inside the caldera moving upward at slow phase. Earthquake activity happens when fresh magma is injected into Bárðarbunga volcano. This is going to continue to happen for a long time, maybe until next eruption.

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14 Replies to “Strong earthquake swarm in Bárðarbunga volcano”

  2. Jón, what do you think of Austamannsbunga recent gps recordings, does it not look like an uplift pretty fast since last year and particularly this january? would love your take on this, thanks 🙂

    2. Icelandic Met Office says that area is inflating at the moment due to magma being injected into the crust at that area. But if it means anything is something I don’t know.

  5. There is one at Katla.

    You could threaten to sue her, maybe then she’ll erupt.

    Otherwise it remains a failed volcano.

  7. Add.:

    It remains a failed volcano with a high monitoring level. Hun kan nemt gøre dig falde i fælden.

    The last part is Dansk, google refused to translate it.

    2. Thanks Jón.

      Yes, so true, a lot of people loose money because she’s not erupting. Better kick her ass. Call her Kick’em Katla.

  8. I don’t know if it has been posted yet here, IMO has published an article about perturbations in the Earth’s gravity field near Iceland:

    http://en.vedur.is/about-imo/news/the-icelandic-glaciers-weighed-from-space

    It says somewhere ” and they have shown how the ice sheets have started to respond to anthropogenic climate change”.

    In the newspaper here there accidentaly was an article about a geologist who wrote a book (Spiegelzee, sea mirror) in which he discusses the causes of the ever changing sea levels through history. Although critisized by other scientists as onesided he maybe does have a point when he states that it is very difficult to almost impossible to separate natural fluctuations in CO2 from anthropogenic. Whereas you can aslo say human is part of nature ofcourse.

    So why these huge differences throughout history where at one time sea level rises with 6 meters and at another it rises with 20 to even 100 meters with approx. the same (high level of) CO2 in the atmosphere. The answer is most likely still we don’t know and further investigation is very much needed.

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