Katla - possible small eruption?

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. Could be magma pushing into a fissure, angle is consistent with the general orientation of the mid-atlantic rift through there.
Or not.
Be quite spectacular if that whole line ruptures though.



click to embiggen

Nice picture gallery at visir.is

Video of flood here (ruv 32 bit wmv) - can't get it to load right now, slashdotted

Jón still best source for live info

Nice perspective along Múlakvísl

TV report with heli footage of bridge and road outage - gonna be tough to fix this one.

More like this

A jökulhlaup has started in Múlakvísl, the glacial river that comes off Mýrdalsjökull, that is the glacier that Katla is under. No eruption at this point though. RUV has a webcam on it (32 bit wmv) - not much to see at midnight EST Lots of small earthquakes in a line across the caldera though.…
Bárðarbunga is arguably the scariest of the 30 or so active volcanoes in Iceland. Extreme volcanoes don't always have extreme eruptions, but they are scary because they have the capability for extreme events, uniquely so. Bárðarbunga - under the ice cap at the top left - from Google maps It is…
News reports in Iceland of magma movements in Hekla. Nope, not Katla, this is the prototype Northern European volcano - Hekla No, that doesn't mean we have given up on Katla, or Hengill, or Askja, or Krýsucík, or any of the other hot spots on the mid-Atlantic ridge that have been rumbling recently…
As the three remaining readers may have noticed, I've been a bit too busy to blog for a couple of weeks. But other blogs go on, and right now, over on SciBling "Eruptions" there is a fascinating live discussion in the comments on the possibility of an imminent eruption in Eyjafjallajökull.…

It's a good thing I'm not on another continent right now.

I'd be really nervous about being stuck, otherwise.

Though we'll just have to wait and see how big it really gets. Too bad we don't yet know to perfectly predict volcanic events.

I was struck by the layer of dirt (ash) on the surface, and much cleaner ice below. Is that layer from last years Eya.. eruption? The ice cap would not appear to be anywhere near an equilibrium configuration (i.e. why is there a lot of dirt on top)?

By Omega Centauri (not verified) on 10 Jul 2011 #permalink