As soon as my 2nd vax dose was 14d behind-me in May 2021, I went to Iceland – which had just recently reopened to vaxed travelers – to see the Fagradalsfjall eruption. It was just a ~50m drive from Reykjavik, plus a ~1h20m hike.
It was spectacular - launching large lava plumes on a roughly 8-minute, reliable cycle, and feeding ever-growing lava fields out around both sides of one hilltop that was ideal for watching the volcano. (The rising lava fields made that perch unreachable just a few weeks later.)
If you've ever wanted to see an eruption up-close, with actual hot flowing lava, get there while it's going/growing. (Of course, this could stop tomorrow or continue for months.)
That hill was amazing! Almost like box seats over the show, close in, but high above places where dangerous gasses most likely to collect, and offering 360° views of surrounding valleys slowly filling with lava.
I did the same in Guatemala - poked the lave a with a stick, threw rocks in and even roasted marshmallows on it. Somehow regular fire roasted ones have never tasted the same since :)
GeologyHub ( https://www.youtube.com/c/GeologyHub/videos ) does very short (~4 minute) daily videos on volcanic activity, and has covered Iceland several of times recently.
It a beautiful documentary with footage from the 60s-90s about a volcanist couple who embarked on a mission to understand volcanoes scientifically and (later) educate the public about their dangers. Terrific cinematography!
This was literally promoted last night by one of my favorite movie writers yesterday. Upon looking at listings all I see were showtimes in major cities like NYC. New Jersey just has mass market junk :/
Iceland continuing to thank its lucky stars (or elves or whatever they believe in) for these absolutely perfect tourist attractions. I mean, a crazy but not too crazy eruption, continuous flow of lava just a stones throw from Reykjavik? And now it's happening again? The Earth's gift that keeps on giving.
Makes me wonder, what if the mayor or head of tourism or something found a way to 'poke' the mantle and make the lava start flowing again after the last one dried up earlier. haha
There is also a live video feed[0] available from the coast guard helicopter as it flew a reconnaissance flight over the eruption with scientists today
edit: sadly the stream has been cut down to minutes from its original hour+ length.
> edit: sadly the stream has been cut down to minutes from its original hour+ length.
Damn, I opened this when you posted it and wanted to come back to it when I had some down time later in the day and saw it's been clipped; it was interesting to see how close all those camera men got to the active site. I was on Maui in 2014 when Kilauea happened on the Big Island and brought back to those days.
It was pretty crazy because I was waiting on tons of equipment coming in from the mainland which got delayed because of this, even though the route was coming in from Oahu before departing to Maui. Luckily this eruption doesn't seem like the one in 2010 which would compound and already horrible flying experience this summer.
I found a link on youtube with an alt live stream, its not as lose but still shows a pretty good vantage point [1].
No no, he's perfectly fine right where he is. In fact, if you chaps could do a better job of keeping him away from the Tolkein estate, that would be lovely.
I can't be the only one to think volcanic eruptions are good settings to test Venus rovers. Composition and pressure are still different sure, but you gotta test these vehicles on Earth before sending them.
We just need a machine that will drill down to the magma, simply install heat transfer rods, and we install a steam turbine above it. Do this everywhere we have a coal / gas power plant
Actually this is already being done in Iceland.
"Geothermal energy is a major source of energy in Iceland, with about 25 percent of the country's electricity generated from tapping the Earth's heat, according to the National Energy Authority of Iceland. About 90 percent of Icelandic households are heated with geothermal energy."
Obviously geothermal is possible. Equally obvious: it is not economically viable as a global replacement for fossil fuels or it would have supplanted them already, especially in Iceland.
It definitely has supplanted them in Iceland. Even the most remote places that used to use oil are generally switching to geothermal for heating. Converting the heat to power isn’t always worth it because the island has so much plentiful hydro power. Fossil fuels account for basically 0% of Icelandic power.
That's energy, OP referred to power, which normally means generated power in these discussions. All of the fossil energy is oil, none is coal, and I believe that's all used in transportation and a tiny bit of heating in the hinterlands.
I wonder how the flying in and out is accounted for in these sorts of figures, if hydrocarbons are ever replaced in aviation it will be dead last after everything else.
Okay. OP' parent referred to "global replacement for fossil fuels or it would have supplanted them already".
I found Iceland's "Fuel Use Forecast" at https://nea.is/fuel/forecast/nr/132 , which appear to be from 2007. It shows aviation as the biggest - and growing - consumer of fuel.
Iceland has so much access to power that they're likely to be the first country to export net negative carbon in some fashion: aluminum I'd guess, we always need that.
This won't involve burning less jet fuel and resembles a Papal indulgence, but maintaining an industrial civilization while decarbonizing industry is impossible without this kind of accounting.
Iceland also had the first magma powered electric generator back in 2009. Was an accidental result of a research drilling project though. Scishow made a video about it back in 2014 [0]
There was a famous case of one volcano in Iceland that stranded a bunch of airplanes resulting in net greenhouse savings. That is the amount of greenhouse gas that the volcano emitted was less then what the airplanes would have otherwise emitted if the volcano wouldn’t have stranded them.
That was a fairly small eruption though and didn’t emit a lot of greenhouse gas. There was another eruption last year in the same place as this one, and it was even smaller. This one seems to be larger then last years eruption, but I would be surprised if this one actually emitted more greenhouse gas over the next year then e.g. Iceland’s aluminum industry.
So to answer your question if we can afford it. The answer is yes. We are experiencing about average number of volcanoes globally, and the greenhouse gas emissions of volcanoes has remained steady for the last few millions years, and we are not seeing any increase. In comparison human greenhouse gas emissions are rising dramatically, we should probably focus our efforts there.
You are correct. The Icelandic volcano will release CO2. Volcanoes play a vital role in the carbon balance in the Earth's atmosphere. If it were not for volcanoes releasing CO2, Earth would be a lifeless snowball planet with little or no greenhouse gases containing the heat. Moreover, that CO2 will be reabsorbed into the crust of the earth through the process of weathering, CO2 + H2O → H2CO3, CaCO3 + H2CO3 → Ca2+ + 2HCO3-. This will also happen for all the CO2 that human activity is belching into the atmosphere. The problem is this will take geologic time for the problem to correct itself.
If I recall the math, the yearly total eruption of actual magma mass is on the same order as the yearly mass of CO2 emitted by humans (some like 80billion tons of magma vs 30billion tons of CO2). The percent, by mass, of dissolved CO2 in that magma is in the single digits.
So to answer to your question: It's a drop in the bucket.
There was an eruption in the same location last year, that lasted for about 6 months. I think it emitted between 1 and 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases. In comparison humans in Iceland emitted around 2-10 million tonnes (depending on what you include) during the same period.
Another fun comparison is that Elon Musk’s 50 min flight in his private jet last Friday between Brownsville, TX and Austin, TX emitted around as much as last years eruption did in a day.
Elon’s 12 hour flight back from Greece a couple of weekends ago emitted 65 tonnes of CO2. That is 1/100 of what the volcano emitted over 24 hours. So he has to fly 50 hours to emit the same amount of CO2 as the volcano does in an hour. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are 50 CEOs flying their private jets at this very moment.
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The Icelandic tendency to write out the word thousand plus all the weirdness of the tonne weight unit (as opposed to Mega-grams and Giga-grams) caused my confusion.
You are making the same factor of 1000 mistake as I did. Elon Musk’s net worth is believed to have peaked last year around 300 billion USD there are around 300 million people living in the USA. If his entire wealth was distributed evenly among every person living in the USA, each would get around 1000 USD.
Although my mistake was because I misread the source (in Icelandic it is common to spell out the thousand, e.g. 4-7 thousand). I’m not sure how you’ve arrived at your number.
Interesting. Although there weren’t many humans around during the Carnian, so the volcanoes are gonna win that for sure.
Also there was a lot of old biomass waiting to be burned back then that exaggerated the CO2 emissions of the super volcanoes, as wood (and other novel carbon structures) evolved before organisms that could brake them down and allow it to rot. I’m not sure a super volcano today would release so much CO2 into the atmosphere as they did back in the late Permian / early Carnian simply because it won’t hit as much stored carbon pockets.
That said. These mega-colossal volcanic eruptions only happen like once every 50,000 years and emit an order of 10-100s of billions of CO2, which is only 1-5 of years of human CO2 emissions at the current rate.
Yes volcanoes do emit greenhouse gasses, but it is not nearly on the same scale as humans.
A year's worth of volcanism emits some amount of CO2, and an ~equivalent amount is consumed and stockpiled by other natural processes. It's why in the long-term of hundreds of thousands of years, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are more or less stable.
Unfortunately, when humans started emitting millions of years of CO2 stockpiles, the natural processes of the carbon cycle that take CO2 out of the atmosphere haven't magically scaled up to compensate.
Volcanism slowly drips water into a bucket that has a small hole in the bottom. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, the water level in the bucket stays more or less the same. Humans come along, and start filling the bucket with a firehose, and then start questioning if they, or the volcano are the reason the bucket overflowed.
This is basic stuff that's covered in any high-school-level textbook on the subject.
“There is no question that very large volcanic eruptions can inject significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens vented approximately 10 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in only 9 hours”
It was spectacular - launching large lava plumes on a roughly 8-minute, reliable cycle, and feeding ever-growing lava fields out around both sides of one hilltop that was ideal for watching the volcano. (The rising lava fields made that perch unreachable just a few weeks later.)
If you've ever wanted to see an eruption up-close, with actual hot flowing lava, get there while it's going/growing. (Of course, this could stop tomorrow or continue for months.)
A good writeup about that time of volcano-tourism: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/23/chasing-the-la...