Watching Iceland

Those of you who have visited this site for a while will know that I have this rather odd curiosity about Icelandic volcanoes, and more specifically the Myrdalsjokull site that sits next to Eyjafjallajokul in southern Iceland. The Icelandic site that monitors earthquakes is one I glance at fairly regularly. It has been an interesting site to visit this winter, since – more than in most years – the island has been relatively quiescent. Except that there has been this fairly consistent activity along the southern part of the rift, running roughly from Reykjavik east to Myrdalsjokull. I bring it up again today just because the sequence of earthquakes has again moved along that fault line and ended at the glacier.

Figure 1. Recent earthquake activity in Iceland (Icelandic Met Office )

Nothing big is happening immediately, just that the whole movement along this southern wing, suggests that, in time, there will be a switch to the north-south element, and at that time the stress on the corner, where we know there has been some magma movement, might prove – as they say – earth shattering!! But this is geological, where time is on a different scale than most of us.