Today (19.04.2017) at 12:34 UTC an earthquake with the magnitude of 4,3 took place on the Reykjanes ridge. This earthquake was felt in Keflavík town and nearby areas. A swarm of aftershocks followed, none of them was above magnitude 3,0. Largest aftershock had the magnitude of 2,9.
The earthquake swarm on the Reykjanes Ridge. Green star is the location of the magnitude 4,3 earthquake. Copyright of this image belongs to Icelandic Met Office.
This earthquake activity appears to be normal rifting activity in line with earlier earthquakes like this that have been happening deeper on the Reykjanes ridge over the past few weeks. There is a good chance that new earthquake activity is going to happen in this same area or nearby area in next days to months.
The earthquake as it appeared on my geophone in Heklubyggð. This image is released under Creative Commons Licence. Please see CC Licence website for more details.
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Interesting swarm this morning ?
http://en.vedur.is/photos/jarisls/170421_0645.png
This are frost cracks in the highland of Iceland. This happens sometimes.
Strange that Bardy has a 3.3 mag and no one makes a comment !
I guess all of us expects it to happen often ?
Yep it’s just business as usual. If something more significant was happening we would most certainly know about it!
I was busy moving my working computer (Desktop) to Windows 10 (from Gentoo Linux) when this happened (it has taken weeks already to move all my data). This is normal earthquake activity for Bárðarbunga volcano, I’ve already written more than 70 articles about this type of activity in this area. Skipping one is not a big deal at the moment. What was interesting about this earthquake was the strong surface wave activity I did see on my geophone, but that has also happened before. I still don’t know what it means yet, but something is going on, but regular earthquake activity like this one happens every week now or close to it and has been doing that since September-2015 and its almost May-2017 now.
Activity is clearly increasing again in Bárðarbunga volcano, but at the moment its going to be a while until a new eruptions happens in Bárðarbunga volcano.
There was a time not so long ago when a 5+ M EQ, the strongest since 1996 for Iceland, on a somewhat weekly basis was considered normal activity for this volcano.
The 1996 M5+ was considered a rare one because it had no volumetric component.
https://www.iris.edu/gallery3/research/2010proposal/earthquake_source_studies/Figure1_BSSA2008361
I read a comment from a specialist on the IMO site that it was a just a quake that was not followed by harmonic tremor, so I thought indeed: ‘business as usual’…
Is this swarm still due to frost cracks ?
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/#view=map
Current temperature in Iceland is too high for frost quakes to happen. Next few days the forecast is predicting temperature up to 16C in some places.
Its colder here in the UK we are having frost and in some parts a sprinkling of snow.
I’m considering a new website for global earthquake activity for earthquakes larger than Mw6.0 or maybe just Mw6.5. Is there a interest for such a website. I might write a test article here about the Chile earthquake sequence if there a interest for such an article.
I’m super interested in things like that. The Italy sequence has been interesting too, as has New Zealand if you consider other topics in the future.
As long as it’s not about women and schnapps I’m ok with it