Posted on by Jón Frímann

Ongoing earthquake activity in Katla volcano

For the past few days there has been a earthquake activity in Katla volcano. This is in two forms, as earthquake swarm that are taking place and earthquakes that spread around the caldera and the volcano.


The earthquake activity in Katla volcano over the past 48 hours. Copyright of this image belongs to Icelandic Met Office.

All clues suggest that an eruption is going to happen soon in Katla volcano, as it currently stands. The problem is that Katla volcano might cool down and not erupt at all, what makes this period different is the fact this earthquake activity has been ongoing since end of August-2016. At the moment the earthquake activity is just a minor activity, with most earthquakes have less magnitude of 3,0. There are no signs that suggest that this activity is slowing or stopping.

Technical problems (Iceland geology)

Yesterday I was having technical problems with Iceland geology. Turns out the source of this issue is that my server is getting too small. I started using the current dedicated server in 2015 and then it was enough (page view count for 1 day ~1100, today that is ~2100 for 1 day). Today, Iceland Geology has traffic that is too much for my current server. This means that I need to do an upgrade when I can afford it. That won’t be this month as it currently stands, moving to a new server costs $219/month, at the moment I’m paying $140/month for dedicated hosting. The new server is going to be 3,60Ghz with 16GB ram. Current server has 4GB ram and just 1,66Ghz CPU. Making this upgrade a urgent one due to the increase in traffic that Iceland geology is currently seeing.

At the moment I’m hoping that I’ll be able to move to a new server in May or June at the latest. I just hope that Katla doesn’t erupt before that, since it would result in a server issues due to lack of capability to handle all the traffic.

20 Replies to “Ongoing earthquake activity in Katla volcano”

  1. Hi Jon,

    That price is way too expensive for a server! Have you tried Vultr? I’m really happy with them. I had a server go down for 1 hour in 2 years and they credited me 2 months service. VPS instances can be as low as $15/month. If you want an extra $20 credit you can use my affiliate link:

    http://www.vultr.com/?ref=7027717-3B

    Good luck!

    1. My website is too large for VPS hosting. It passed that level of hosting few years ago. This is quite normal price for dedicated hosting, I did check the price at other hosting services in both Germany and Canada (currently I’m hosting in the U.S). This is within that price range, making it not too expensive service.

      2. try this guy i could get you something cheep maybe even free for a bit

        the guys name is Clayton…..

      3. I have compared prices and they don’t match. I plan on being with my current hosting provider. Just switching packages with them when I make the change in June (estimated time of the upgrade).

  2. Is there a reason that u use dedicated hosting for the website?
    Is shared hosting not a lot cheaper for the website.

    1. I get way more traffic than is allowed on shared hosting. I started with shared hosting in 2011, since then the traffic has grown and I cannot host it any more on shared hosting.

      1. May i ask how much traffic you have in a month? If you want i can ask my hoster if the allow your amount of traffic? They start around 6 € for 100GB webspace (ssd) on shared hosting but you get 0ne cpu and 512mb ram.

      2. I got unmetered traffic at my host provider. The problem is that I need more CPU/RAM for the website. I have long passed any acceptable level for shared hosting. Because I need more CPU/RAM for my website, the only way is to upgrade the hardware and that just costs more money.

        I also have to deal with spike in traffic. When Bárðarbunga erupted I was getting in the first few days 95.000 page views a day (largest day). I’m expecting at least triple that amount of traffic once Katla gets going and starts erupting. I also expect that the traffic is going to be around ~50.000 page views a day during that period.

        Shared hosting, VPS hosting is just too small for this website today. That is not going to change as the time passes.

        During Bárðarbunga eruption, the traffic was around 70.000 page views during all of September-2015, from October-2014 the average traffic was around 21.000 page views a day until November-2014, then it dropped to 14.000 page views and got down to ~3000 page views in December-2014.

  3. The current activity seems to have decreased. Now there seem to more earthquakes with smaller individual events, it looks like there are a few repeats of a pattern and then the pattern changes. I have also noticed that this time glacial river conductivity has remained fairly steady (>180) whether or not there has been recent earthquake activity. More gases being released at a steadier rate, perhaps?

    I hope, though, that nothing really dramatic happens in Iceland before you have resolved your server issues! 🙂

    1. At the moment there is a really bad storm happening in Iceland. After that comes a new storm, this bad weather is going to last for the next 2 to 3 days.

      I don’t know why the conductivity has dropped like this, maybe the hydrothermal areas have boiled out.

  5. This is close to my home about 180 k due west :
    02/24/17 12:28:22 PM Lat 49.5 – Long 129.48 10k depth 5.1 Mag located 198 km WSW of Pt. Hardy,BC
    It was one of 26 quakes in 48 hours! Seems to be located at the intersection of 3 plates.
    There have been a series of shallow earthquakes that occurred offshore west of northern Vancouver Island. The source area of this group of events has a very complicated tectonic setting. It is the place where the Pacific plate, the Juan de Fuca plate, and the smaller Explorer plate interact with each other. In theory, it is possible to have events related to both the opening process of the mid-ocean ridge and the strike-slip motion along transform faults between two plates. According to our preliminary analysis, most of the events that occurred in the past few weeks were associated with transform faults.
    Honn Kao, Ph.D.
    Research Scientist, Seismology
    Geological Survey of Canada / Natural Resources Canada

    1. I did notice this. I don’t like this earthquake activity, this might be a long earthquake sign about a larger earthquake that is going to happen in your area in few years time (at the most). But this is difficult to know for sure.

  8. Jon,

    It seems that your financial problem with hosting your blog comes from success. More and more people find your website a valuable resource. Perhaps you can get more of your readers to support the inevitably growing expenses. Could you perhaps offer a free “home page”, that provides a summary of current volcanic and seismic activity, plus a “subscriber portal” that provides access to more detail and to your technical discussion groups?

    An arrangement like that would still give free access to valuable information. However, it would more fairly distribute the expenses over a larger base of frequent users.

    1. Setting up a subscriber website is a lot of work and I’m just a one person. My money problems have more to do with debt and the fact that I’m trying to pay them back in aggressive manner (high as I can tolerate it). I’ve also had other problems in last few years that has to do with taxes in Denmark and such details, they have been shorted out now.

      With more traffic I get more adverting income I hope. That should at least help covering some of the hosting costs I hope. It is also just a matter of time when I pay back all my debt and once that happens it is going to free up considerable amount of money for me, money that is now going into paying back debt and interest of that debt.

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