Iceland's Earthquake patterns

Every so often I look at the earthquakes that occur, as a regular part of life, in Iceland. In recent months they seem to have a more regular focus along the lower edge of the rift that is slowing pulling the country apart, and since the current crop ends at the Mýrdalsjökull crater, I suspect it will continue to draw my attention.

Figure 1. Earthquakes occurring in the last 48 hours in Iceland. The star denotes one bigger than M3.

Nothing to be alarmed about, just interesting to note how this shows the separation markers that will ultimately lead to more significant events.

Iceland's quake activity

After a quiet few months, I see that Iceland is seeing a fair number of earthquakes above 3 in a confined region at the North end of the island. (Those are the events marked with green stars).


Figure 1. Earthquakes in Iceland in the last 24 hours (Iceland Met Office)

A closer look shows how linear the different events have been.


Figure 2. More detailed view of the events shown in Figure 1. (Iceland Met Office).
This post was updated late in the day. (see below the fold).

UPDATE 3. By late evening Wednesday the activity was still strong, though perhaps a few less 4's. (map appended).

UPDATE 4. Friday afternoon and the activity seems to be tapering off a little - and as The Earthquake Report notes quake swarms of this type are quite frequent in the region, and usually peter out after a few days or weeks.

UPDATE 1 Well the situation has not yet stabilized, and as I go to bed, some 12 hours later, the quakes are spreading along the fault line to the mainland.

UPDATE 2. The activity is occurring along the Tjörnes Fraction Zone,, and is being followed and described by Jón Frímann over at the Iceland Geology blog.


Figure 3. The situation at 11 pm Tuesday evening (Missouri time)(Iceland Met Office)

And this is the situation at around the same time on Wednesday evening.


Figure 4. Change in the pattern late Wednesday evening (Iceland Met Office)

Iceland rumbles a bit

This is just a quite arrow to point to the number of quakes above a level 3 that have been happening in Iceland over the last few hours.

Earthquakes in Iceland as shown on the 20th September 2012 (Icelandic Met Office). (Stars are for earthquakes over a level 3, and turn yellow, from green, after 24-hours)

Not quite sure what it means, but Jón Frímann has more of a description of what is going on.

There is no more . . . yet!

Katla in Iceland keeps on grumbling

It has been some while since I have posted on the happenings around the Katla volcano in Iceland. I still drop by the Icelandic Met Office site to see how the quake patterns are developing, and the region continues to be the focus of earthquakes that consistently focus around the caldera of the volcano. Something is obviously going to happen, but what and when remain somewhat of a mystery. But I was struck by the pattern of quakes over the past 24-hours. Nothing of any great significance – though I wonder why the quakes are forming the circular pattern? We shall see, no doubt.
Figure 1. Pattern of quakes on Mydralsjokull over the 24-hours up to June 27, 2012 (Icelandic Met Office).
  Jón Frímann has noted that there have been several earthquake swarms in the region in recent weeks, though the most recent did not have any harmonic tremors associated with it. But since this could be an indicator of some thermal activity under the ice cap, it may lead to a flood of melt water from the glacier in the near future. No more.

Some hopefully closing thoughts for now on Icelandic volcanoes

The re-opening of the European skies means, among other things, a couple of days of quiet here at Bit Tooth, as I have now left home on a somewhat circuitous trip to the UK. Hopefully I will arrive on Saturday morning, by which time a lot of the major disruption should be over. Public debate will likely now center on who was to blame and for what.

However as a follow-up to my earlier post on aircraft damage and the damage to fighters in particular, I do note that there are reports of two aircraft already having been damaged following the removal of the ban on flying, (H/t Admiral Valdemar) and that after Pinatubo erupted, aircraft damage was found in over 20 planes flying up to 1,000 km distant from the volcano.

This is probably, barring a major change in Iceland, my last post on this topic for a while – I expect that it won’t come up again for about a year until there is an eruption at Katla or Laki, potentially about ten times the size of the current event, and that the whole issue will come back into the headlines. So I thought I would explain why I think that there will still be an eruption further along the rift line, and how, simplistically why I expect this to happen. Call it a summary of the posts to date if you will.

Let me walk you through my thinking. Iceland sits on the spot where the plates that comprise the shell of the Earth, are slowly moving apart. The plate edges are marked in pink, and by the line of volcanoes, in this graphic.

Map of Iceland showing major volcanoes (The Times of London)

If you look at the Icelandic Met Office website, they show, every two minutes, where the latest earthquakes in Iceland have occurred over the past two days. Looking at the current picture, one can locate the earthquakes relative to the joint plane and the line of volcanoes.


Note that if you double click on the map it will enlarge – vide:

Area around Eyjafyallajokull, showing the current earthquakes there

It is not however Eyjafyallajokul that has my interest. Let me try and explain why. The two plates which lie either side of the line of volcanoes are moving apart at a rate of about an inch a year. As theplates move apart they pull on the rock that sits between them, so that it splits and cracks, and emits the energy release from that fracture that we call an earthquake. As the splits grow they create a weakness plane along the fault line. Under the fracture zone there is a magma that will force its way to the surface, when it finds a weakness of fracture plane that is large enough to start the magma flow.

Once the magma starts to flow it will open the fissure under pressure, and erode the walls of the passage until you get the standard round shape for the conduit that carries magma to the caldera where it is ejected. But the pressure of the flow also helps push the rock apart, and in the process can open adjacent passages in the rock under tension, allowing a secondary flow to establish. That will likely lead, within a year of so, to the more dramatic eruption of Katla, which sits under the Myrdalsjokull glacier.

But there has been a lot of activity up around the north end of the larger glacier near the peak called Grimsfjatt. This is sometimes referred to as the Loki volcano. And this may be creating the circumstances for a rupture that will equate to that of Laki, which is currently quiescent.

But stepping back a minute to look at the overall activities that occur when plates interact, what has been learned in places such as California, is that when the plates are moving together and not building up stress, then there are always a series of small earthquakes going on along the fault, as the ground accommodates the movement.

California quakes of the last two days

It is only when the earthquakes stop happening in a region that the stresses start to build up. And the longer there is between quakes, then generally the larger the quake is that marks the end of the quiescent period.

But those are compression/shear failures and movements. In Iceland the rock is moving apart under tension, with the added complexity of an underlying magma trying to escape through preferred fracture zones. Yet looking at the current location of the quakes in Iceland, there haven’t been any in the zone between Myrdalsjokull and Vatnajokull. Now a) this is where Laki lies and b) having been only watching for just over a week, this may be building large sand castles out of very dry sand, but nevertheless it is a little bit of a puzzler, and so, based on three different thought threads, I suspect that while the current eruption may rumble on for a while, and fade rapidly from the MSM, sometime within the next 18-months Iceland will be back in the headlines, posing a much greater problem for Europe.

Having said which, I’m still optimistic about getting into London this weekend, we shall see how it transpires.

European airspace 6:45 am CST

This image showing 128 aircraft in European airspace, would indicate that airlines are beginning to find ways of getting planes into the air. However the patterns show where the plume is still probably too dense to allow flights. Including the UK, where the Government is apparently going to send Navy ships to help.

And just to make you feel comfortable about listening to experts, this was the listing for Europe's ten most dangerous volcanoes (in terms of their impact on Europe) just four days ago:

Volcano . . . . . . . . .Country . . . . . .Affected population . . . Values of residences at risk
(US $billion)
1. Vesuvius . . . . . . . Italy . . . . . . . . 1,651,950 . . . . . . . . . . 66.1
2. Campi Flegrei . . . Italy . . . . . . . . . . 144,144 . . . . . . . . . . .7.8
3. La Soufriere . . . . .Guadeloupe, . . . . .94,037 . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8
Guadeloupe France
4. Etna . . . . . . . . . . . Italy . . . . . . . . . . 70,819 . . . . . . . . . . .. 2.8
5. Agua de Pau . . . . .Azores, . . . . . . . .34,307 . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4
Portugal
6. Soufriere . . . . . Saint Vincent . . . . . .24,493 . . . . . . . . . . .1.0
Saint Vincent, Caribbean
7. Furnas . . . . . . . Azores, . . . . . . . . . .19,862 . . . . . . . . . . 0.8
Portugal
8. Sete Cidades . . . Azores, . . . . . . . . . 17,889 . . . . . . . . . . . 0.7
Portugal
9. Hekla . . . . . . . ..Iceland . . . . . . . . . . 10,024 . . . . . . . . . . .0.4
10. Mt Pelee . . . . .Martinique, . . . . . . .10,002 . . . . . . . . . . 0.4
France
Hekla is the only one from Iceland that makes the list, which, given that Katla is likely to be perhaps ten times as large as the current eruption from Eyjafjallajokull, and may well go in the next 2 years perhaps underscores the occasional need to question expert opinion.

Iceland volcanoes and when can I travel?

Yikes! Flightradar has taken out their inclusion of the airports in the overall picture, and the emptiness of the European skies becomes even more apparent.

European skies at 12:48 pm CST

And so the next question comes as to how long will this last? And unfortunately the news there is not particularly encouraging. Even short flights through light ash from this eruption have already been shown to damage aircraft and so authorities are rightly going to be very conservative on what they allow. The backlog on passengers already caught in the cancellations are now up to more than a week.

Honeymooners Paul and Tracy Sheehan, of Kent, England, were among those trapped by the ashy atmosphere.

The couple arrived to catch a transfer flight on Friday night - only to hear the next available American Airlines flight home was one week away.

The hope that the volcano would have settled down enough to allow a scientific flight over the plume has been premature, and the flight was cancelled as the eruption continues.

Given that there is talk of other volcanoes erupting it might also be appropriate to go into a little more depth on the scale of these events. They are measured on a scale known as the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) with values that can be read from this table:
Volcano Explosivity Index (from Rowlett UNC)

The initial measure for Eyjafjallajokull was at a scale of 1, but it hasn’t been possible to assess where it is now fitting. In contrast, as I noted Thursday when Katla last went it was at a scale of 5, and the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991 was a 6.

However Pinatubo was a single event eruption, ejecting some 15 – 30 million tons of sulfur dioxide, along with 5.5 cubic km of other material in a nine hour period on June 15th. The consequences lasted much longer.

The eruption plume of Mount Pinatubo's various gases and ash reached high into the atmosphere within two hours of the eruption, attaining an altitude of 34 km (21 miles) high and over 400 km (250 miles) wide. This eruption was the largest disturbance of the stratosphere since the eruption of Krakatau in 1883 (but ten times larger than Mount St. Helens in 1980). The aerosol cloud spread around the earth in two weeks and covered the planet within a year. During 1992 and 1993, the Ozone hole over Antarctica reached an unprecedented size.

The cloud over the earth reduced global temperatures. In 1992 and 1993, the average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere was reduced 0.5 to 0.6°C and the entire planet was cooled 0.4 to 0.5°C. The maximum reduction in global temperature occurred in August 1992 with a reduction of 0.73°C. The eruption is believed to have influenced such events as 1993 floods along the Mississippi river and the drought in the Sahel region of Africa. The United States experienced its third coldest and third wettest summer in 77 years during 1992.

Icelandic volcanoes are generally less immediately intense, spread over a longer fissure, and last much longer.

The initial fissure eruption at Eyjafjallajokull (AP)

Katla which is expected to possibly also erupt, last erupted in a major way in 1918, with 25 major eruptions in the last 1200 years. (Which gives an average interval of 48 years). These intervals are likely to continue, on average, given that the two plates that touch under Iceland are moving apart at a speed of around 19 mm/year. While this sounds as though it is a small amount, it puts the rock in tension, which makes it a lot easier for fluid such as magma to penetrate through flaws and fissures in the rock, as these open under that movement. It also helps explain why, on occasion, there is a progression of the eruption up a line, as we are currently seeing with Eyjafjallajokull. And given that there may be volcanic activity at different places, it might help to see where the different volcanic/separation zones are:

The EVZ, fissure swarms, central volcanoes and calderas. H and T denote the Hekla and Torfaj ̈okull central volcanoes. Focal mechanism and location of the 1987 Vatnafj ̈oll earthquake are from Bjarnason and Einarsson [1991].(Jonsson )

The Eastern Volcanic Zone (EVZ) shown above is thought to now be more dominant than the Western one, which has been relatively inactive, and it is here that the current crop of potential eruptive sources sit and that are being worried over. (Hekla for example has erupted in 1970 (VEI 3); 1980 (VEI 3); 1981 (VEI 2); 1991 (VEI 3); and 2000 (VEI 3).

So, given that the last Eyjafjallajokull eruption lasted over a year, and the length of time since the last Katla eruption, and the movement of the plates being relatively consistent, there is not a lot of room for optimism. It may not be an immediate follow-on in the human scale of time, but in geological terms a year later is almost such, so it may well be that the powers in Europe, and around the world, may have to rethink how folks can be moved, if air travel is going to be more of a hit and miss event for a couple of years. So will I get to Europe next week?

The possible impact of the Icelandic volcanoes on Energy Production

While it is early in the morning in Europe the following picture shows the impact of the volcano in Iceland on European air traffic if you compare Northern (none) and Southern (60) European flights. The blue crosses are airports. The volcano has already had a stunning impact on Europe, although articles about it are already dropping below the lead headlines. There is a thought that the plume may last another five days, and even though the cloud is largely invisible to those who are being impacted by it, the damage by neglecting these precautions could be severe. And given that the British election is on May 6th the impact of a sustained eruption on the debates in the UK, and the result may go beyond just limiting the travel of those who would campaign, to become more dominant with the length of the flight curtailments and the responses to help resolve what are likely to be growing transportation problems.

Status of flights over Europe (flight radar 24).

UPDATE The presence of sulphur dioxide is already obvious to local residents, though there don't appear to be any concerns over its toxicity. And parts of Britain may get some planes back in the air by this evening or tomorrow. I will repeat information on toxicity

WITH ACUTE EXPOSURE, 5 PPM CAUSES DRYNESS OF NOSE & THROAT AND A MEASUREABLE INCR IN RESISTANCE TO BRONCHIAL AIR FLOW; 6 TO 8 PPM CAUSES A DECR IN TIDAL RESP VOLUME. SNEEZING, COUGH & EYE IRRITATION OCCUR AT 10 PPM; 20 PPM CAUSED BRONCHOSPASM; 50 PPM CAUSES EXTREME DISCOMFORT BUT NO INJURY IN LESS THAN A 30-MIN EXPOSURE ... 1000 PPM CAUSES DEATH IN FROM 10 MIN TO SEVERAL HR BY RESP DEPRESSION.

The larger eruptions of Katla, have ejected up to 1.5 x 10^9 cu m of material with a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of up to 5. For comparison Mt Pinatubo in 1991 ejected 1.1 x 10^10 cu.m. with a VEI of 6.

The Times has an interesting graphic that shows some of the concerns and I am going to use a bit of it to show that the problem may be a little bigger than even the article suggests.

To begin with recognize that Iceland is at the intersection of different plates that together form the shell of the planet. Whereas in some parts of the world these plates are pushing together and riding over each other, in this part of the world they are tending more to separate, so that the magma, on which the plates ride, can make its way up along the joint planes and erupt at the surface.

Map of Iceland showing major volcanoes (The Times of London)


Now what the picture is concerned about is that generally when Eyjaflallajokull erupts so does Kalta, which is right next door. But Katla is a larger system and the eruption is generally much more severe.

Unfortunately what has also to be considered is that there are a whole line of craters, not shown on this map, between Katla and Vatnajokull, which are also a worry. Laki, an even greater threat than Katla, lies along this line.

Iceland's Laki volcano erupted in 1783, freeing gases that turned into smog. The smog floated across the Jet Stream, changing weather patterns. Many died from gas poisoning in the British Isles. Crop production fell in western Europe. Famine spread. . . . . . .

The winter of 1784 was also one of the longest and coldest on record in North America. New England reported a record stretch of below-zero temperatures and New Jersey reported record snow accumulation. The Mississippi River also reportedly froze in New Orleans.

It is at the orange flag in this picture.

(Google Earth)
There is a line of eruption calderas from Katla up to Laki, which is up around Skaftareldar.

Remember that the 3.5 earthquake I wrote about yesterday lies beyond Laki on the line from Eyjaflallajokull, and was centered further north in the Vatnajokull. Some have blamed the weather created by the eight-month eruption of Laki as a possible contributory cause to the French Revolution.

An eruption of that length, ejecting as much material as it may into the atmosphere, would have consequences that go beyond just the ability to survive the noxious gaseous clouds.

The impact of the dust is shown in this picture from the British Met Office, which shows that plume reaching down past Scotland:

Dust cloud passing Scotland (Met Office)

And the consequent distribution at different levels of the atmosphere.

High and low level ash distribution (Met Office via the Guardian)
The agriculture of Europe would be damaged by a prolonged eruption with this distribution, and with it the possible production of biodiesel. Consider that the growth of rapeseed (canola) around the world has been steadily rising over the past few years.


With European countries sitting just behind the leaders.


Somewhere over 4 million metric tons of the crop currently goes to producing biodiesel, mainly in Europe. (Heading up towards 100,000 bd). Losing a year of that crop (and large scale volcanic activity can have an impact for over four years on the climate and the ground chemistry), particularly given the current possible approach of the peaking of conventional oil production, could have an unanticipated impact on overall liquid fuel availability and price.

Unfortunately rapeseed is only one of the crops that will be effected and the significant drop in crop yields does not appear to be getting much attention yet.

Beyond that, there should be a little concern for the wind turbines that are now dotted over the horizon. The concern is with the speed at which the tips travel through the air. The air, that looks clean, will contain small particles of very sharp glass and other volcanic ejecta, that are the primary cause for the grounding of aircraft across Europe. While the aircraft can see very sudden loss in engine power, because of the high speeds with which they encounter the clouds, and the volumes of debris sucked into engines that then fail. (There are also video explanations)

Wind wing tip speeds have been projected to be in the range from 264 ft/sec to 326 ft/sec. At impact speeds over 120 ft/sec the particles from the eruption will start to erode the blades of the turbine. If the eruption continues for weeks, and the turbines rotate in that atmosphere (which looks clear to normal vision) then they will lose surface quality, and perhaps the particles will enter into the generators (as they do on aircraft) doing significant damage.

Thus, beyond the initial inconvenience of the loss of a way to fly (bearing in mind I am supposed to fly to Europe myself soon), there are the longer concerns over both the crops this summer and for the next four, and for the longer term health of the turbines. All in all it is a reminder that there is never a time that Nature, with a little nudge, cannot remind us of the risks of complacency. . (And I suspect that it will not be long before the usual climate change advocates will be dominating the papers with a new set of headlines to get them back on the bandwagon)

A short update on the Iceland volcano and Chinese earthquakes

Because there have been larger earthquakes (indicating possibly the passage of magma) under the ice of the glacier at Eyjafjallajokull and there are now fissures under the glacier, the authorities have issued an evacuation order for the area. h/t Jon at WUWT. There was a 3.1 earthquake two days ago, and there have been two (one at 3.5 and one at 3.0) more recently. The larger one is at the location of the upper green star in the map. It is at the other end of the range of volcanoes that run between the two and have been the source of the large eruptions of the past. The lower star, at Eyjafjallajokull is the one that everyone is concerned about.
(Update the eruption has now started and the evacuation is underway.)

Map showing the latest earthquakes (green means within the last 24 hours, and a star means it is over magnitude 3.0) (Icelandic Met Office) .
The concern at the moment relates mainly to the melting of the glacier, and the resulting floods that will follow. There is not, at the moment, a great deal of evidence of a major eruption further up the line, which is where the big ones have happened in the past. However the linear activity of the recent quakes there, and then the larger one, makes it an area to keep watching. I am keeping a list of the dates, location and sizes of the quakes above 3.0 at the bottom of this post. I am also going to start adding depths, since the northern green star earthquake is only 1.1 km below the surface. However the ash plume from the volcano is starting to cause air traffic problems over Norway.



Update This is the photo of the eruption that mg talks about in the comments:


The comment notes:

The three red arrows show the locations of the eruptions under the ice. The blue arrow points north.

The ice layer was 650 ft thick, before the eruption below it. Flooding that it has caused has already started to give problems. And if you want scale on the top picture Katla, the icecap to the East of yjafjallajokull is 12 miles away and under the Mýrdalsjökull glacier. The new fissure is about 1.2 miles long and the eruption is considered to be 10 to 20 times more powerful than that last week. There are web cameras set up to view the original eruption, and likely also the new one.

I have also just heard about the major earthquake in western China. I was in Xining City and drove around parts of Qinghai Province last year. One of the things that struck me is the number of small coal-fired brickworks, that were producing fired brick, and supplying a change from the mud brick of which most houses were constructed. Sadly that modernization was not fast enough, and most of the casualties are reported being buried under wood and mud brick buildings, though there are some concrete buildings (including a government one) that have collapsed.

Location of the Chinese Quake (BBC )

The area is remote, and difficult to drive around, so that rescue may be more difficult than in the previous large quake, and our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.

An earthquake in Iceland

Update Since I wrote this post I have discovered that Icenews had the location of the Katla volcano wrong in the figure below. I have corrected the location in a separate post. My apologies.

There have been a couple of earthquakes that have exceeded magnitude 7 over the last few days. First there was the 7.2 magnitude earthquake near Mexicali on Sunday, which destroyed more than 5,000 homes. Then there was the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck Northern Sumatra at 5:15 pm (CST) today. The latter was smaller and will apparently not produce a tsunami of the type that killed over 230,000 people in 2004, in Sumatra. Nevertheless the impact is likely to have been severe.

And yet I keep checking with the erupting Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, that began spewing lava on March 21st. Remembering that it has usually presaged a much more violent eruption from the nearby Katla volcano, which being under the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, will likely generate results that are expected to be much more severe. Vulcanologists have been expecting an eruption from the volcano for some time. It forms part of the set with Laki and Eldgia which are considered to be some of the most powerful volcanoes in the world.

Thus when I read that there has just been a 3.7 magnitude earthquake in the Katla region, moving away from the initial eruption and between Katla and Laki, my concerns just grew a little. There are already reports of toxic gas emissions from this smaller eruption, which could warn of much greater problems if much higher volumes of gases such as sulfur dioxide are ejected with a subsequent eruption from the volcanoes to the North-East of the current eruption.

Location of the earthquake relative to Katla, Eyjafjallajokull is further west.

Secretary Chu in Newsweek

My dependence on good internet service has been underlined by a week where it has not been available. Unfortunately the motel we were staying at in Maine had a problem with its server, and we returned home to find a problem with our own internet connection. Thus a couple of the posts that I was completing will be a little delayed, until I have that indispensable tool, a good connection. This has been prepared largely without, and similarly posted with access just to find a couple of references.

And in that meantime I have been perusing this week’s NEWSWEEK, on my Kindle, and noted that the Secretary of Energy had a new interview. The first thing that he said in it was in response to a request to define President Obama’s energy policy. Here is what he said:

We look at all the factors and we say, how can we get to the lowest possible level of carbon as quickly as possible and not only at the lowest cost but with the greatest possible economic opportunity for the U.S.?

That’s it!

The rest of the interview was not that much more constructive (one of the benefits of the Kindle is that it counts words, in this case the article – including questions – ran to 782 words - the attempted length of this piece). There was no mention of peak oil, or energy security or prices in the article. In response to the criticism that the Stimulus package did not make enough investment in energy, the Secretary said that they would fund projects for up to three years maximum, and encouraged innovators to “swing for the fences.” Whatever that means (in context)! I will admit to having helped put a couple or more proposals into the DOE hopper, though most came back rather quickly and negatively (one was successful). What struck me about the process, and the attitude redolent in the Secretary’s remarks was the focus on short term benefits and application. Most of the work is also oriented to larger group efforts, with a lot less focus on the smaller innovator to stimulate new ideas. If you can’t claim a home run within the remaining life of this Administration, don’t bother applying.

He appears to hope for a start to a Smarter Electric Grid, to double renewable energy contributions by 2012, and to get the nuclear power plant construction industry restarted in this term. But he also recognizes that carbon capture and sequestration is at least 10-years away from deployment. His “blue sky” hopes are for cheap (below $2) per watt photo-voltaic systems, (current costs he quoted as being over $4) and he still looks to the generation of fuels such as gasoline directly from biomass. This is not the ethanol production that the industry and government are still heavily involved in, but rather focuses back on the work he was supporting while at LBNL looking at using natural fauna to do the digestion and fuel generation.

But he returned to the need to put a price on carbon, and for a cap-and-trade bill to make sure that the point on where his focus was, would not be missed.

Sigh! He sounds as though the “scientist in a tower” description still fits him like a glove. There are considerable issues in regard to the changing energy supply of the planet that should be giving him pause in his charge against carbon. Increasing numbers of people are pointing to a coming crisis in oil supply. The British government, at the urging of folk such as the head of Virgin Airways, has decided that perhaps it is about time that it took its head out of the sand, and took a hard look at the situation. Of course it is also taking a look at the reality of climate change predictions, though with the coming of a general election, it is not clear whether either effort will amount to much.

I am increasingly struck by the perception that many of the folk that write about both climate change and energy supply do so with a very complacent attitude toward the continuing situation. The potential impact from a major impact on climate from a severe eruption of the Laki suite of volcanoes in Iceland seems to be being totally ignored. (A quick skim through some of the scientific papers suggests that the major eruption follows within a couple of years of the current eruption of the smaller volcano). The problem is that should there be a problem, running around in a panic for a couple of days is going to do nothing constructive in stopping folk from being killed.

Well we will have to see, in the relatively short term, whether that complacency is warranted. Being a Cassandra is unlikely to get more recognition this time around.

The volcano in Iceland

The current volcanic eruption in Iceland raises a question of the Precautionary Principle but one calling for an opposing action to that most commonly sought in ameliorating damaging climate change. If I can summarize the situation in a somewhat condensed version, the current eruption in Iceland at the Eyjafjallajokull site has now been going on for a couple of days (video) and is throwing a plume of ash up to 5 miles into the overlying air.

View of the plume from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption (scienceblogs). More photos here

What should be a concern, it appears, however, is that this particular volcano, although in itself not that large, is often a precursor to the eruption of the Katla volcano, which is nearby but further north- east. While the current eruption started away from a glacier, the Katla lies under the Myrdalsjoekull glacier, and the precedents are not good.

"Eyjafjallajokull has blown three times in the past thousand years," Dr McGarvie told The Times, "in 920AD, in 1612 and between 1821 and 1823. Each time it set off Katla." The likelihood of Katla blowing could become clear "in a few weeks or a few months", he said.

The second Katla eruption has, historically, had much greater impacts since it has had the power to inject large volumes of particles and gases into the atmosphere that create a sufficiently dense cloud that sunlight is reduced, harvests are affected and famines result. For example when the nearby Laki fissures erupted in 1783 the results that were reported included:

Iceland's Laki volcano erupted in 1783, freeing gases that turned into smog. The smog floated across the Jet Stream, changing weather patterns. Many died from gas poisoning in the British Isles. Crop production fell in western Europe. Famine spread. Some even linked the eruption, which helped fuel famine, to the French Revolution. Painters in the 18th century illustrated fiery sunsets in their works.

The winter of 1784 was also one of the longest and coldest on record in North America. New England reported a record stretch of below-zero temperatures and New Jersey reported record snow accumulation. The Mississippi River also reportedly froze in New Orleans.

The last eruption of Katla was not that severe, although there was severe flooding. But it can be violent, throwing large volumes of material into the air. The consequence of the Laki eruption of 1783-4 (it lasted for eight months and ejected over 9 cubic miles of basaltic lava and a quarter of the population of Iceland died from starvation, the effect on winter temperatures in the US was evident.

(Sigurdsson 1982)

But it is not the fine particles that apparently cause the most climate impact, rather the large volumes of gases that also are ejected and turn into acid aerosols that contribute to the disastrous consequences. It has been projected that there were some 8 million tons of fluorine and 120 million tons of sulphur dioxide released. To put this in context, during the Mount Pinatubo eruption (which also had a short term cooling on global climate) the volcano is projected to have emitted some 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and that this lowered the global temperature by perhaps 0.8 deg C in 1992. (The aerosols reflecting back more solar energy into space.)

Mount Pinatubo erupting (USGS photo)

The fissures themselves, from which the Laki lava flowed, stretch some 16- miles though not as a continuous crack, but rather the lava flowed from about 130 craters.

Laki craters (climate4you)

The general locations of the Katla to the earlier Laki and Eldgja eruptive flows is shown here:

Location of the Laki, Katla and Eldgja fissures, the current eruption is further south and west, on the hidden side of the Mydalsjokull glacier.

The severity of the impacts of these eruptions on the global climate and the resulting devastation on the harvests is a matter of record. We know that there are more coming, and, from past history the damage will be great.

That record suggests that there will soon be another serious eruption that, on past performance, will also eject large quantities of sulfur dioxide gases into the atmosphere and induce another period of cooling.

Since the previous evidence has shown that this cooling has not been good for the global health, perhaps it might be about time that folks started working on what can be done to stop, or collect these large volumes of gases before they become too predatory. Certainly the problem of neutralizing the gas or otherwise collecting it or storing it is significant (but then so is that for carbon dioxide). However we know where it is going to come from, and some of the mechanics of how it will migrate upwards. There are large unknowns in terms of how we might capture, control, or neutralize a lot of the acid-forming gasses, but the size of the problem has never stopped us before.

And if the problem were to be addressed by the nations of the world, perhaps we could, in time, assuage some of the known negative effects from the global cooling that we can now expect as the Icelandic eruption continues. This cooling may well already be more certain than near term global warming, and more immediately likely to occur, so under the same Precautionary Principles that are driving the huge investments in climate change already, ought we not be spending our time right now trying to find ways to stop the impact of these massive eruptions on the health of the globe.

Silly thought – but one that suggests that the problems don’t always only have one side, and that we might find out by visual observation the down-sides of too much cooling and its effect on people and agriculture, perhaps sooner than we would like.

P42. Pick Points

Half-a-dozen or so stories of interest:

Back in March Switzerland signed a deal with Iran for a 25-year supply of natural gas it appears that this will bring a fourth gas corridor though Turkey, that will provide an additional connection to Europe, and it remains under criticism. Iran sees it as the start of a new relationship with Europe, and a possible model for others. The gas will come from Assalouyeh and require a new pipeline that will be built by the Turks. Germany has taken the hint, and Gerhard Schroeder is now in Tehran to see what sort of a deal they can cut. The pipeline will also provide a pathway for Turkmenistan gas to get into Europe without going through Russia. Iran, meanwhile still considers the discussions ongoing with Bahrein, even though the latter cut them off when some Iranians claimed the kingdom belonged to them. Iran is discounting those statements.

Russia, meanwhile has apparently not been sending the agreed amount of natural gas to Poland. So far it has only got 75% of the agreed amount, and now Gazprom wants a new deal. The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a special report on Eurasian Energy Security that calls, among other things for a better network of interconnections and integrating Russia more into the energy picture in Western Europe. It also calls for a common regulatory framework. Rune’s work on whether the UK will get through the winter without problems, suggests it will be close.

Iceland is looking to exploit its Geothermal power in the face of major financial problems. Of the three natural resources the country has, fish, hydro and geothermal, the first two are in some trouble, and with an increasing amount of geothermal due to come on line in the next few years all they need are investors. For those in the US looking at using geothermal, the more likely domestic source will be ground-source heat pumps, and the cap of $2,000 for a tax credit which would otherwise be 30% of the cost, has been removed. In an earlier post at TOD I heard that the going price was in the $20,000 to $30,000 range, and so this is a significant change (but not enough to justify my doing it yet).

The numbers for oil production from Mexico, of which I have written in an earlier post, are growing worse quite quickly. Country production fell 9.2% in January , with Cantarell now down to 772,000 bd. Pemex claim they can keep it to an average of 700,000 bd this year, but this may be doubtful, and will hurt exports. That did not help oil and gas futures (the latter at $4 per million btu). There is a new documentary on the oil situation now out called Blind Spot which has got a favorable review at TOD but since they were out of copies when I tried to order one, it will be a wee while before I can do a review.

Last week China was tying up loans with Russia to ensure long-term delivery, and then with Brazil. This week it is Australia’s turn with Exxon Mobil signing a long term agreement for LNG from the Gorgon project that will send 2 million tons a year of gas north for 20-25 years. Projections for the LNG plants being put into Gladstone in Australia have slipped from 2011 to 2012 for the first LNG plant, which will liquefy coalbed methane, and the customer has not been defined. (Though as I noted last week I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a South Asian accent).

The current low prices for energy, taken with flooding from the fire-fighting last year, means that the historic Barentsburg coal mine in Norway may not reopen.

More stories can be found at The Energy Bulletin and Drumbeat at The Oil Drum.

Glaciers and the Little Ice Age

I suppose that many of us that are trying to do “due diligence” in looking at the scientific data that relates to the issues of climate change come to the table with different perspectives. In my case, as I explained earlier, my curiosity was wetted by the information that the Earth goes through cyclic periods of warming and cooling, the most recent of which have become known as The Medieval Warming Period, and the Little Ice Age. I am currently reading Jean Grove’s “Little Ice Ages-Ancient and Modern.” She was a Fellow and Director of Studies in Geography at Girton College, Cambridge, and, since her death in 2000, the book has been issued in a second updated edition, by Dick Grove, her husband. It is now in two volumes, and this will be about some of the information that lies in the first of these. It deals with glaciers, but glaciers grow from snow, and that snowfall has changed over the years.


As a fairly comprehensive text, it takes the history of many of the glaciers around the world back beyond their most recent past to discuss how they have advanced and retreated. Using evidence from, among other things, church records, it shows how farms that were prosperous in the MWP had been wiped out and over-run by the glacial advances of the LIA. And it shows, through copious references to the scientific literature in the field, the times and rates of these advances and retreats. Some of those who discuss this cycle have suggested that the MWP was a localized event in Europe, this text clearly shows that it was not, though I will talk about the MWP period more in a later post, and in this one concentrate on the event that is the most recent Bond event, as some now call these cyclic cold periods. It is interesting that in the fluctuating entry that covers the Bond event at Wikipedia the LIA comes and goes as a recognized Bond event (today it is gone).

Jared Diamond, in “Collapse – How Societies Decide to Collapse of Succeed,” wrote of the contrast between the native population of Greenland (I will call them the Thule, though there are debates on which group it was) and those descended from the families who came to Greenland with Erik the Red in around 982 AD. (He does not address that the Thule may, in turn have arrived in Greenland from Alaska by migrating across the North of Canada in the same time frame). Diamond concludes that the inability of the Vikings to adapt to the sea harvest as the weather got colder made it more difficult to sustain the conventional farming life in Greenland. However Grove points out that the advance of the glaciers to the sea changed the patterns of fish migration, so that the harvest may not have been there, at least in the form that they were used to – though if the fish were not there, then presumably the seals that feed on them would also have migrated, and the Thule also, so that only the farmers, tied to the land would be left starving). However Grove also quotes Arneborg who examined the bone collagen of some of the settlers, which indicated that the Norse diet changed from 20% sea food in the eleventh century to 80% in the fourteenth, so perhaps it was just the climate change that marked the beginning of the LIA in that time frame that was the real cause of the disappearance of the Norse.

Being tied to the land in the peculiarities of society of the time had considerable disadvantage as the glaciers advanced. The cold winds around the glacier were not good for crops. Grove quotes from a court of inquiry report of 1742

It was apparent that it was the nearness of the glacier which is the cause of crop failure on this farm, for in the fields where the crops were now in ear, the ears on the side towards the glacier from the west were quite brown, and on the other side green, though some ears were not even in bud because the cold and the strong cold winds which the glacier exhales freezes it away in one night’s still weather.

With the winter snowfalls and short cold summers the glaciers, in this case the Bersetbreen branch of the Jostedalsbreen glacier in Norway, advanced through arable farmed land over the period from 1680 to 1745. After reaching a peak advance in 1748 it has since retreated some 4.5 km according to Erikstad.

And it is in this advance and retreat of the glaciers, whether in Greenland, Norway, Switzerland The Pyrenees, the Urals, The Caucasus, Tibet and the Himalaya, Mexico, Ecuador, Africa or South America that the bulk of the text is devoted. The dates of glacial advance, the point of maximum range and then the consequent retreats are documented and discussed. The book goes into considerable detail, where it is available, documenting both glacier behavior, and the effects that the extensions of the glacier had on the surrounding inhabited areas. This effect was particularly severe in Europe coinciding as it did, with the onset of the Black Death. And while glaciers grow and shrink in part due to changes in precipitation, she documents, for example, the changes in Snowfall in Scotland during the LIA, as illustrative of the changing patterns that predominated.

Grove cites others who show that the LIA was pervasive outside of just the glacial fields. For example Thompson, who considered that 1490 marked in the beginning of the LIA in the Northern Andes, with the long-term Holocene cooling culminating in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In Chile the Ada Glacier advanced until some time after 1858, but by 1882 was in retreat, and has been retreating since. Similarly in Argentina by 1895 Hauthol was reporting on the glacier in the Atuel valley wrote that

the glaciers clearly indicate not only that until a short time ago they were of much greater extent but also that they are now losing volume and retreating at a great rate.

Between 1914 and 1937 Groeber reported that the glacier had retreated 3.2 km.

The Patagonian Icefields include the San Rafael and San Quentin glaciers which have been studied more intensely than others. Both have been in general retreat for most of the last century, after reaching a maximum LIA extent in around 1876. The San Rafael has oscillated over a distance of 10 km. Since the glaciers have had floating tongues which is more prone to precipitation as a means of control, rather than temperature, these oscillations may not be climate controlled. Moving further south into the Southern Patagonian Icefield

In the early part of the twentieth century the easter outlet glaciers of the Southern Patagonian Icefield retreated rapidly from extended postions reached in the mid to late nineteenth century, leaving clear trim lines in the vegetation (Lliboutry, Clapperton).

A short review of a book that has references to supporting scientific papers in virtually every paragraph and which covers the field with the depth and detail that this does can do very little justice to it. The book, however, clearly shows that the LIA was a global event, and that it brought glaciers forward around the world. Further it shows that the globe began recovering from the depths of the LIA in the 1800’s and glaciers have been retreating from their maximum extent for most of the twentieth century. This predates the increases in carbon dioxide so that glacial retreat, in and of itself, cannot be used as evidence of CO2 impact on climate. The variations that occur in advance and retreat speeds and directions, even between glaciers that are quite close show that there can be over-riding other parameters that are more influential than temperature change, although when there is a general trend for glaciers to grow through the LIA from minimal positions before it, and then to retreat similarly generally after the peak of the LIA conforms to its presence.

Other evidence can be used to surmise the temperatures before the LIA arrived, Grove cites grain being grown in Greenland and Iceland, in areas where farms have not yet been able to be re-established. She cites orange growth in the Tang and Deng counties of Xichuan (which cannot grow them at present) as late as1264 to mark the beginning of the LIA, with the MWP ending somewhat later in Tibet, though there is some discrepancy in the data from different ice cores from that country.

On an editorial note I would have added the references cited, unfortunately they are in the second volume, and I don’t have that one yet.