Man that video of the lava from the airplane looks gorgeous. The Reykjanes Peninsula has the best eruptions! Picturesque but without the threat of pyroclastic flows killing everything in sight.
Are there volcano eruption chasers in Iceland like there are tornado chasers in the US? Seems like it would be a rather intermittent but exciting hobby since it's easier to get quite a bit closer.
The Icelandic Civil Defense is also awesome. They have some guidelines for gas heater use during eruptions that includes: Remember other heating options, such as cuddling under blankets, wearing the wool socks gifted to us at Christmas, and closing curtains over windows.
This set of eruptions has already killed one person who fell into one of the cracks in Grindavik and the current lack of hot water could be dangerous if not resolved quickly. My wife’s grandfather is in his mid-80s and is in hospital in Keflavik without hot water and there’s nowhere to move him at the moment, just extra blankets on a day where it’s -6C. So it might seem benign but that’s not the case.
The eruption didn't kill that person, gung-ho working practices and the lack of strictly adhering to something like OSHA killed that person.
He was working around a newly opened fissure without being clipped into something like a safety harness, which I daresay is standard practice in most of the rest of Europe and the US in similar circumstances.
The soil shifted, or he fell. In either case someone directly or indirectly working as a contractor for the government died as a result of unsafe and obviously dangerous work practices.
The government then went into overdrive to push the narrative that these fissures were so dangerous in general that they had to evacuate the town immediately.
That can also be true, but the immediate cause is needless and dangerous expediency.
In the end they fell into shit and came out smelling like roses, because the eruption happened to start a few days later.
The issue of that easily preventable death was quickly forgotten by most (but e.g. [1], in Icelandic, raises so some of the same concerns).
The evacuation order at the time had nothing to to with an imminent eruption, just the supposed general danger to the public from shifting soil and fissures.
Some other eruption in the area was expected eventually, but that it happened so fast came as a surprise.
> The eruption didn't kill that person, gung-ho working practices and the lack of strictly adhering to something like OSHA killed that person.
The eruption killed them, however it's phrased. I'm aware of the semantic arguments, but it's a mistake to apply them to reality and I'm not going to engage with them with a person dead and more threatened, including the person who posted above!
> the immediate cause is needless and dangerous expediency
Why should we believe that and not the government?
There wasn't any eruption at the time. There was ongoing seismic shifting and land uplift, that's why the fissures were forming.
It happened to erupt shortly afterwards, but the way these things go that's just happenstance. The geology service did not suspect an imminent eruption at the time of the evacuation.
In retrospect it was good that the town was evacuated at the time, and probably the previous evacuation shouldn't have been lifted. I'm just noting the chronology and what was stated and known at the time.
> I'm not going to engage with them with a person dead.
Well, you'd feel right at home in Iceland, but personally I wish it had more of the US's attitude of mandatory and critical root cause investigations when workplace deaths occur.
> Why should we believe that and not the government?
I think the facts speak for themselves. Up-thread I linked to an article by a local professor of volcanology basically agreeing with what I'm saying here. It's in Icelandic, but Google Translate does a decent job of it if you're interested.
The stated argument for evacuating the town was that due to ongoing seismic shifts. New fissures were opening regularly, and that these presented an unacceptable danger to public safety.
I'm pointing out that it's at best a very convenient omission that the evacuation wasn't happening due to that scenario.
Nobody randomly fell into a fissure by accident. That person and others were being directed to work adjacent to and in these fissures.
It's an on-the-clock workplace accident due to grossly inadequate safety practices.
We're not talking about some obscure inconsequential OSHA rule here. A lot of things have to go systemically wrong to have someone working alone at an unsecured edge without a teather.
The notion that you might heat a house with electricity or by setting trees or dinosaurs on fire is so foreign to Icelanders that they don't think this is worth clarifying in the English translation of the news feed.
It'll have other long-tail effects, e.g. some people with outdoor hot tubs in the area are probably scrambling to drain them and all their plumbing now. Some rely on constant drip heating to avoid the pipes bursting.
Why are outdoor hot tubs full in the first place when it's -10°C (15°F) outside?
Well obviously when boiling water practically bubbles out of the ground for free you're going to get in it at scalding temperatures even if you need to dig it out of the snow first. Doesn't that go without saying?
>> The notion that you might heat a house with electricity or by setting trees or dinosaurs on fire is so foreign to Icelanders
I'm sorry but this is hyperbole. I just spent nearly a week staying in a house *in Iceland* that was heated with wood and diesel fuel. Granted, it's an old house, built about 100 years ago, but it's hardly a foreign concept.
Obviously my comment's a bit torque-in-cheek, but I've never heard of fossil fuel heating in Iceland in residential dwellings outside af Grímsey, an island 40km off the coast.
There's fireplaces, but not for heating entire building, unless it's a small summer home or a cottage.
I'm sure there's exceptions, but what I was pointing out is that geothermal heating is universal enough that the implications of the hot water being out don't need to be explained.
Just for comparison my house was built in 1897 and whilst it had a chimney because it used to be heated that way it’s fully hooked up to hot water for heating.
In general the backup plan in Iceland is "Well, I guess we're having to wear all this clothing we put on so we don't die of exposure when we venture outside inside the house now.".
I think the hospitals have backup diesel electric generators, but in general nobody's got backup heating, except perhaps the odd free-standing electric heater.
I don't know, but I'd expect someone at the hospital there is thinking of running those in select places.
Icelandic media is now patiently explaining to people the upsides ("yay, heat!") and downsides (you might die) of running the propane gas heaters that have just sold out in enclosed spaces: https://www.ruv.is/frettir/innlent/2024-02-08-ad-ymsu-ad-hug...
Thanks for the information. Without electricity, the situation would become really gnarly, as those heaters, hairdryers, and electrical stovetops could also be used for heating.
There is a fair bit of "eruption chasing" going on. People want to see it up close.
I lived in Iceland in 2010, when Eyjafjallajökull erupted and stopped most of the air-traffic in Europe. I was fortunate enough to go with some friends (in jeeps with very large tires, to traverse a snow-covered glacier) to see the eruption up very close. We were about 200m from the erupting lava. Most amazing nature-experience of my life - by a mile.
It's "just" a basaltic eruption characteristic of shield volcanoes, and Hawaii is probably the best-known example of shield volcanic eruptions. Kilauea has been essentially continuously erupting for most of its observed history, and has not to my knowledge ever produced a pyroclastic flow (although there have been some steam explosions resulting from magma overflowing the water table before the water table boils off).
Neither this eruption nor any other recent eruption in Iceland is characteristic of shield volcanoes.
A shield volcano requires a certain viscosity of lava and flow rate.
There are a few shield volcanoes in Iceland, the term "shield volcano" even comes from Icelandic; From the eponymous volcano Skjaldbreiður ("broad shield"), but none are formed recently.
Most Icelandic lava is too thick to form shield volcanoes. It forms mountains, ridges, lava fields etc.
The lava that's now bubbling up in Iceland is referred to as "Apalhraun". Which in a fun bit of linguistic happenstance originates from the Hawaiian ʻAʻā, Hawaii in turn borrowing a derivative of the word "Skjaldbreiður" to refer to the volcano type it's most known for.
I love a government entity with a sense of humor. In Minnesota, the feds can have our mildly entertaining road signs when they pry them from our cold dead hands https://www.kltv.com/2024/01/21/despite-new-federal-standard... (but it's 50 degrees right now so, you know, not particularly cold)
I believe that there's a translation error in this news story (I sent a note to the author).
I think that they mean that they've turned off the ventilation system at the airport. I doubt that they've got air conditioning.
If they do then presumably they could still heat the building, unless it's some industrial unit that works by exchanging heat with the incoming hot water?
But more likely they're using hot water radiators, which now aren't getting hot water. So to preserve the thermal mass of the air they've turned off the ventilation in the building.
Almost every house in Iceland is heated with hot water directly, which then just ends up in the drain. Wasteful? Yes, but there's some benefits to living on a volcano with abundant water.
Yeah, "hot water" is a bit of a misnomer with Iceland. It's their heating infrastructure. In the U.S. it'd be more akin to saying "natural gas shut off in -6°C weather" or "Electricity cut off in Texas during 20°F weather" (even in the U.S. heating varies by location).
It's heating and "hot water". Icelandic building are both heated by the hot water supply, and that water runs directly to the hot water taps (sinks, showers etc.).
Well, "directly". It's now common to make use of a heat exchanger, so you're getting warmed-up cold water instead. E.g. the capital area adds sulphur to the hot water supply, so some don't want to use it directly.
But in either case, if the municipal hot water doesn't run houses have neither heat nor hot showers.
They'll also have icy driveways, a very common use of the runoff is to have a water-heated driveway make use of the outgoing hot water.
Well, the Earth's paying for it, and it'll turn into solid rock slightly earlier than it otherwise would have due to modern Icelandic district heating practices.
As the Earth is mostly an approximately Earth-sized ball of molten rock it's generally agreed that this will take "a while".
We've also decided that it's such a large value of "a while" that we're going to split the difference and proclaim that this non-renewable geothermal energy extraction practice is actually renewable.
Nevermind that we're talking about time scales where we might expect all the non-renewable fossil fuel we're extracting to have been renewed several times over by natural processes.
I think geothermal energy might get away with it on a technicality: The Earth won't actually turn solid. Before it can do that it's expected to be swallowed up by the Sun turning into a Red Giant.
By that time geothermal heat might have become too much of a good thing.
As long as the heat is not turned into other forms of energy (electricity, potential energy, chemical energy, etc.), it is actually not being "used". Just moved to a slightly different place. Such usage actually wouldn't speed up cooling off the Earth even by a miniscule amount since the heat is at the surface already.
While in Iceland good sources of heat may be close to the surface, so exploiting them may not change a lot the cooling speed of the Earth, in most places in order to obtain enough geothermal energy the heat must be brought from high depth and its use is equivalent with significantly reducing the thermal resistance of the upper layer of Earth's crust at that point, increasing the speed at which the Earth is cooling.
The deepest borehole ever drilled is just over 12km, it's 6371km to the Earth's core. If the Earth was the size of a basketball that would get you around 1/8th of a millimeter into the surface.
The reason geothermal's easier in Iceland is that the heat's close to the surface, so you can get away with shallower boreholes.
I'd think the overall effect would be trivial either way, but I don't see how the thickness of the crust would make a difference.
> Lava has flowed over Njarðvíkuræð, the hot water pipeline that runs from HS Orka's geothermal power plant in Svartsengi to Njarðvíkur, causing supply issues.
Are there volcano eruption chasers in Iceland like there are tornado chasers in the US? Seems like it would be a rather intermittent but exciting hobby since it's easier to get quite a bit closer.
The Icelandic Civil Defense is also awesome. They have some guidelines for gas heater use during eruptions that includes: Remember other heating options, such as cuddling under blankets, wearing the wool socks gifted to us at Christmas, and closing curtains over windows.