What Next for 2020? Volcanoes of Course!

It is going pretty nuts in Iceland as well - over 18,000 earthquakes in the last ~7 days while mostly small a fair few with a magnitude over 3.

The type of tremor activity more often than not leads to a notable eruption but things are complex.
 
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Rroff said:
It is going pretty nuts in Iceland as well - over 18,000 earthquakes in the last ~7 days while mostly small a fair few with a magnitude over 3.

The type of tremor activity more often than not leads to a notable eruption but things are complex.
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One of the problems with volcanoes in a nutshell - things are too complex to predict eruptions with any degree of accuracy. In some cases, millions of people would need to be evacuated. That would take weeks and would be a major risk in itself even if it could be done. Imagine being the person who made the decision on whether or not to order an evacuation. At best you have "it will probably erupt within the next few weeks, as far as we can tell". At worst, you get a few hours warning. Or none.

When I was a child, I thought volcanoes erupted rarely and locally. Like a geyser but bigger. Dangerous to people living nearby, but only within maybe a mile or so. Sometimes I wish I was still that ignorant about volcanoes.
 
There are worse.

Campi Flegrei for example. A super volcano in Italy that the caldera, or crater, is 13Km in diameter. It's so big that no one even realised what it was. It makes most volcanoes look trivial. Several million people actually live inside the crater. The land has been rising recently, hinting that we are on the way to at least a minor eruption. A full eruption of Campi Flegrei could well take out much of the human population of the world. And Campi Flegrei is not the largest either. Yellowstone Park is much bigger with a crater size of around 60km. If that one goes off America is instantly dead and most of the world would follow in the next few years as a global winter decimated crops.
The last time a super volcano went off it is thought it reduced the population of India to around three hundred people. That was Toba in Sumatra, 75,000 years ago. When the Siberian Flats were created by a mass eruption life nearly came to an end for planet earth.
We live with the very misplaced belief that planet earth is a stable old place, but truth is that it is not at all. We have just been lucky enough no to see anything bad happen in recorded history. But these eruptions will happen again. It's just a question of when. And given that most volcanoes are not monitored, it could be tomorrow.
 
pp111 said:
There are worse.

We live with the very misplaced belief that planet earth is a stable old place, but truth is that it is not at all.
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Given the gaps in the fossil record and the pace at which homo sapiens was able to go from the trees to the moon, it is entirely feasible that dinosaurs were self-aware and wearing nylons at the time the asteroid hit...
 
MikeTimbers said:
Given the gaps in the fossil record and the pace at which homo sapiens was able to go from the trees to the moon, it is entirely feasible that dinosaurs were self-aware and wearing nylons at the time the asteroid hit...
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T-Rex in nylons. Now there's an image I will never get out of my head.
 
MikeTimbers said:
Given the gaps in the fossil record and the pace at which homo sapiens was able to go from the trees to the moon, it is entirely feasible that dinosaurs were self-aware and wearing nylons at the time the asteroid hit...
Click to expand...

T-Rex in nylons. Now there's an image I will never get out of my head.
 
pp111 said:
But these eruptions will happen again. It's just a question of when. And given that most volcanoes are not monitored, it could be tomorrow.
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Any significant eruption should generate tremors well ahead of it from the magma intrusion and there are other signs earthquake related as gases progress through the system, etc. though forecasting exactly when a volcano will erupt is hideously complex we do generally have a good idea when a volcano is in a dormant stage or effectively extinct.
 
Up to nearly 50K earthquakes in Iceland over the last two weeks! with a fair few in the 3-5+ scale. Still not clear if it is building up to something but the most likely eruption would be in the Fagradalsfjall area - most likely not an explosive (unless it reached the ocean or some other change in circumstances) or massive ash creating event but probably quite a significant amount of magma making it to the surface.
 
Not so much kaboom unless magma reaches the ocean or some other natural feature before the surface - which probably won't happen here as it looks like the dyke hit resistance and went upwards. I'm guessing it is going to be more of an oozing whatever type of volcano that is - though given the activity probably quite a lot of magma to come.
 
Surprised with all the earthquakes leading up to it that it is so far a relatively tame eruption albeit sometimes it just takes a little bit to ease the pressure and that is it.

Seems quite a lot of earthquake activity in general at the moment with a mix of high 5s through to 7s around dunno if it is leading up to something more generally and whether there is any connection to any of it at all.
 
Wonder what those weird blue orbs and lights that keep appearing/disappearing are? Thought it might be headlights of some volcanologists or something, but the way they're acting is very strange.
 
Malevolence said:
Wonder what those weird blue orbs and lights that keep appearing/disappearing are? Thought it might be headlights of some volcanologists or something, but the way they're acting is very strange.
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Saw something in the chat before saying it was scientists, etc. up there doing stuff.
 
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