After months of being quiet there has now been new earthquake activity in Öræfajökull volcano. The earthquake activity that took place was all just minor earthquakes but the deepest of them had a depth of 14 km and the second deepest had a depth of 12 km. Other earthquakes where at shallower depth.
Earthquake activity in Öræfajökull volcano. Copyright of this image belongs to Icelandic Met Office.
It is not possible to know what is going on in Öræfajökull volcano because what happens before an eruption is not documented in any details and the documents that exists today are old and the oldest documents of an eruption in Öræfajökull volcano are getting close to 660 years old. The younger documents are only 293 years old. This earthquake activity seems to be over at the writing of this article but it might resume without warning at any time.
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It is certainly accumulating energy, seismic activity is much greater than in 2011.
Often the Oraefajokull earthquakes are also followed by minor seismic activity in Esjufjoll.
The only thing I would like to ask you is how big is the Esjufjoll caldera?
The size of the caldera for Esjufjöll volcano is 40km2 according to Global Volcanism Program. There is this strange connection between activity in Öræfajökull volcano and Esjufjöll volcano. I don’t know how that works. About 18 years ago there was a spike in activity in Esjufjöll volcano with dyke intrusions but since then it has quieted down and nothing more has happened besides few minor earthquakes.
Global volcanism Program, https://volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn=374020