Earthquake in South West Iceland

Sizable earthquake in southwest Iceland this afternoon

Magnitude 6.1-6.3 on Richter scale, by Selfoss, about 50 km from Reykjavik,
no damage reported in Reykjavik, road to Selfoss is cut, probably some damge in the general area. No reports of injuries, though it is early to tell for sure.

Earthquake was felt throughout western Iceland, and buildings in Reykjavik were evacuated. Continuing aftershocks are being felt.

Heavy blog traffic in Iceland, on this, but no immediate reports of serious damage or injury, mostly "yeah I felt it too" and "was it bigger than the 'quake of 2000"

Seems like visir.is is down - presumably overloaded.

Sounds like it was under Ingólfsfjalli - good photo here of a fresh avalanche

Cracks on the main road

More furniture and crockery pics - sounds like the towns of Selfoss and Hveragerði had a bit of a scare.

CNN report

Mogginn - with new improved canonical pictures of broken crockery

Good coverage (in Icelandic, natch) at www.visir.is - lots of pictures.

Photo of location and maps of epicenter and aftershocks at this photo blog

Report is the epicenter was shallow, only 2 km below the surface.
Now reports of damage, including road and bridges, water and phone lines and "houses completely destroyed" in Selfoss.

Preliminary reports of injuries now. All minor so far. - Bruising/scrapes, no major injuries reported.

Hospital/clinic at Selfoss has considerable damage and is being partially evacuated as there are concerns the building is no longer structurally safe.

Tags

More like this

After a brief hiatus during which the first two fissuers at Fimmvörðuháls closed, the main caldera at Eyjafjallajökull let rip early in the morning of April 14th. ash plume through the clouds - from visir.is - click to embiggen There was a jökulhlaup - wish I could have been there with…
Uwe Reinhardt, the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton makes a bold suggestion in the Daily Princetonian: Bomb Iceland! In lieu of bombing Iran. It is true that it'd be easier (easier still if the US had not broken its bilateral treaty with Iceland and abandoned its air base…
Cratering of ice sheet and possible small eruption under ice. click to embiggen Crater in ice over one of sites of the 1918 eruption - four of these formed overnight. Lot of shallow quakes still in a line across the caldera - some might be ice-surface cracking, others are several km deep.…
@Dave Ewing: The headline you won't be reading: "Millions saved in Japan by good engineering and government building codes". But it's the truth. My heart goes out to all the people affected the earthquake in Japan, and by the resulting tsunamis which have hit much of the Pacific basin. Heck, we…

The BBC has some video available, including the Parliament being briefly interrupted (possibly a good thing, depending on your politics), plus the usual surveillance camera footage. The link below has sort of a Greatest Hits compilation, and the links at the video's end will take you to a few more, some partially redundant. There's also a brief audio interview with Pall Einarsson, a geophysics professor, lower down on the same page:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7426369.stm

By Emory Kimbrough (not verified) on 31 May 2008 #permalink