Iceland livens up

Jón Frímann points to an interesting pattern of earthquakes around the caldera at Bardarbunga, suggesting that the volcano might be getting ready to erupt.

Icelandic Met Office.

It is hard to tell from the webcams, since Bardarbunga 2 is shaking too much. This may be bad weather - except that the weather shown at the first camera shows that it is clear on the left, suggesting that there is a lot more ash being thrown into the air. So this may be a more significant eruption already, due to the ash cloud.

Bardarbunga web cam at 10:43 am 12th Sept.

UPDATE: The increasing concern comes from the clouds of SO2 that are being emitted from the craters. This poses threats, not only to those in Iceland, but also potentially to some in Northern Europe. The smell of sulphur is now being detected in Norway. The latest path for the gases has been posted:

Figure 3. Path of the gas cloud from Iceland.(RUV )

The Icelandic Met Office is now issuing bulletins in English as well as Icelandic.

More later.