Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.06.2011, Qupperneq 20

dóttir, who was with a group of hikers
descending Vatnajökull glacier when
the Grímsvötn volcano began erupting
beneath the glacier. “We can explain
one eruption, but an eruption year af-
ter year? People are just going to stop
coming”. Unable to drive west, Anna
and the hikers headed east, full circle
around the island, to return to Reykja-
vík two days later. In the northeast, they
faced snow and icy roads, which even
in Iceland is not your everyday summer
weather.
At the same time, the Smyril Line
ferry made its first trip of the summer
from Denmark to Seyðisfjörður, an artsy
fishing village in the Eastfjords of Ice-
land. Its 600 passengers found them-
selves stuck in the small town, pop.
668, where grocery stores were out of
milk for two days due to roads rendered
impassable by non-eruption related
weather conditions.
THE ASH SUDDENTLY LETS UP
Meanwhile, Iceland’s volunteer rescue
team could be counted on, and we
were guided to a community house in
Kirkjubæjarklaustur where the Red
Cross was looking after about a dozen
others who became stranded in the ash
that Sunday morning. They pointed to a
stack of mattresses and suggested we
make ourselves comfortable.
Local residents and volunteers Páll
Ragnarsson and his wife, María Guð-
mundsdóttir, had made a big pot of
asparagus soup and an assortment of
open-faced sandwiches for everyone.
The clock read 1:30 in the afternoon,
but everything else pointed more to
1:30 in the morning. “I thought I would
have time to knit today”, María said
pointing to her bag full of unfinished
work, “but we’ve had about 50 people,
counting nurses and the rescue team,
come in and out”.
Then just as we had prepared to
spend the night, the wind died down,
the hazy brown landscape reappeared
and a local policeman informed us that
we could drive back to Reykjavík. “But
hurry”, he said.
This was a relief for farmers who
had just let their sheep and new lambs
out for the summer before Grímsvötn
began erupting. Among them were
Jóhanna Jónsdóttir and her husband,
Pálmi Harðarsson, who have 300 sheep
at their farm Hunkubakkar. “It was re-
ally difficult to hear them crying ‘baaa’
while we were inside”, Jóhanna told
us. “We couldn’t do anything; it wasn’t
possible to go outside. It was so dark
that when you put out your arm, you
couldn’t see your own fingers”.
While Jóhanna and Pálmi didn’t lose
any of their sheep, other farmers were
not as fortunate. Looking for shelter,
some sheep fell into trenches and died.
Others went temporarily or permanent-
ly blind from the ash.
GRÍMSVÖTN SUBSIDES
Ultimately it’s not travellers or tour-
ists who faced the brunt of the erup-
tion, but Iceland’s farmers, who have to
deal with the ash. With the exception
of southeast Iceland, the country was
largely free of ash, and those travellers
who were briefly grounded in Reykjavík
were granted free admission to muse-
ums and swimming pools to ease the
inconvenience it caused them.
Despite having spent the entire
day cleaning, Jóhanna Jónsdóttir was
in good spirits when we met her at
Hunkubakkar late Wednesday evening.
She had taped windows and sealed
doors with damp towels, but the ash
still made its way into her house and
the twenty guesthouses she operates.
She anticipated vacuuming through
the weekend (so they can probably be
booked by now at www.hunkubakkar.
is).
Jóhanna, who relies on the guest-
houses to supplement what she said
was otherwise meagre income pro-
vided by sheep farming, wasn’t worried
about the impact that this would have
on tourism. “Some might cancel, but
if anything, more will come out of cu-
riosity”, she said. “I’m full of hope and
happy to have the rain”.
As The Economist reported on May
28: “ICELANDAIR, the island nation's
national carrier, has been quick to put
on a happy face in the wake of this
week's eruption of the Grimsvotn vol-
cano”.
They based this on a press release
sent from the airline: “Curious visitors
have already begun to flock to the area,
eager to check out the affected area
and see the ash for themselves. How-
ever, they will have to hurry because
the efficient ash clean-up operation is
already progressing quickly and local
residents hope life in the southeast will
be back to normal very soon”.
When we left Hunkubakkar, Jóhan-
na was getting ready to host seventeen
fire fighters who were in the area to
help spray houses down, for if the wet
ash settles it becomes a stiff cement-
like paste. To help with the cleaning ef-
forts, the government also put to work
Iceland’s unemployed, which are at 8.3
percent today compared with 1 percent
before the economic crisis hit in 2008.
Harold Camping may have been
right about earthquakes commencing
at 18:00, but the rest turned out to be
a bunch of hokey-pokey. While Þórunn
and Erlendur were hit by more ash
than they had expecting, they took it in
stride. “We want to emphasise that this
is not doomsday”, Þórunn told us. “This
is simply nature at work, and nobody
died”.
Thus, life on a volcanically active is-
land goes on.
“Looking for shelter, some sheep fell into trenches
and died. Others went temporarily or permanently
blind from the ash.”
Did Doomsday Hit Iceland?
The 89-year old evangelist Harold Camp-
ing predicted that the world would come
to an end on May 21. So aggressive was
his campaign that the ads even appeared
frequently in Icelandic newspapers.
Specifically, Harold predicted that the
world would begin to shake at 18:00 and
then the chosen ones would be zapped up
to Heaven, leaving the rest of us to pre-
sumably burn in hell (after a year or so in
purgatory). Citing reports that everything
was fine in New Zealand and Tonga, which
would have been among the first dooms-
day victims, Vísir was quick to report: “The
World Is Still Here”.
Then at 18:00 in Iceland, in an ironic
twist to the DOOMSDAY story, the Ice-
landic Meteorological Office picked up
increased seismic activity coming from
Grímsvötn, Iceland’s most active volcano.
Hours later the subglacial volcano was
erupting full force, sending a plume of ash
15 kilometres into the air.
When the world did not end, Harold
Camping released a statement explaining
that he had actually just been five months
off. Apparently doomsday did in fact start
on May 21 as a "spiritual coming" and it will
culminate in the real doomsday on October
21.
So maybe Grímsvötn goes beyond
those two days of ash-bother? We’ll find
out soon enough.
Iceland sure has been in the global
news a lot this past year or so and a lot
of that has been to do with volcanoes.
So why does this little country, strand-
ed in the middle of the North-Atlantic,
have so many volcanoes and why are
they so damned troublesome for the
rest of the world? I was lucky enough
to cover the Eyjafjallajökull eruption for
Grapevine last year and following the
recent eruption at Grímsvötn I’ve been
drafted to try to answer the many volca-
no-related questions that may be whiz-
zing through your head. So hold onto
your hats, ladies and gentlemen, for this
whistle-stop tour through the complex
science that is Icelandic volcanology...
WHY IS ICELAND EVEN THERE,
ANYWAY?
Iceland looks like a very lonely country,
stuck most out of place amongst a sea
of, well, sea. So why has it sprung up
right there, of all places? To answer this
question we must strip back the watery
layer and take a good look at the ocean
floor.
When we do so, we see that the is-
land of Iceland is located on the cross-
ing place of two major linear features.
The first of these is a huge rift, running
roughly north to south, splitting the At-
lantic in two. This is the Mid-Atlantic
Ridge, a zone where two of the plates
comprising the Earth are spreading
apart, creating new land as they do so.
In this case we have the North Ameri-
can plate on the west side and the Eur-
asian plate to the east. The ridge itself
is slightly raised from the surrounding
ocean floor, but nowhere near the wa-
ter surface, so this alone cannot explain
Iceland’s prominence.
For this we must turn to the other
feature—a raised strip of ocean floor
running between the Faeroe Islands
and Scotland to the southeast and
Greenland to the northwest. What
caused this? Well, the current belief is
that it is due to a so-called ‘hot spot’.
The exact reasons for hot-spot forma-
tion is still very much under debate in
the scientific community, but the basic
fact is that there appears to be an area
of anomalous heating under one spot
on the crust, in this case under one part
of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This causes
more volcanism—and in turn, more
land production—along this section
of the ridge. It is believed that as the
plates spread apart along the ridge, the
greater production at this point caused
a raised ridge to form as the plates
moved away from the hot-spot.
But what about Iceland itself? Hon-
estly I don’t think anyone is quite sure
why Iceland sits so high above that
ridge. For some reason, more land is
being produced faster now than in the
past and this has allowed an island to
form above the surface of the ocean.
What it does mean, however, is that that
hot-spot still resides beneath Iceland
and this can account for much of the
country’s volcanism.
A VOLCANO IS A VOLCANO, RIGHT?
Not necessarily. On a basic level most
people would consider a volcano as a
hole in the ground that erupts liquid
rock, or magma—called lava once it
reaches the surface. But there is actu-
ally a vast range of different volcano
types, all with different eruption styles
and hazards that come with them. Most
volcanically active areas of the world
are typified by one or two types, but
Iceland is rather unique in that it pos-
sesses almost the full range of types.
The type of eruption a volcano
produces—and by extension therefore
the type of volcanic edifice formed—
depends largely on the type of lava
produced. And this in itself depends
mostly on where the lava comes from.
Without going into too much detail, the
explosivity of an eruption is generally
related to how viscous (thick) the lava
is.
Think of the volcanoes in Hawaii,
for example. A good example of typical
hot-spot volcanism, the activity here
most often comes in the form of spec-
tacular fountains of glowing orange
lava erupted from a crater of elongated
fissure (collectively known as the vent).
The lavas here have very low viscos-
ity—in other words they flow very eas-
ily—and are generally named ‘basalts’
due to their chemical composition.
Small bubbles of gas within the lava
can escape easily and they essentially
propel the lava high into the air. Over
the years, the lava spreads a long way
from the vent, resulting in large, flattish
volcanoes that we typically refer to as
‘shield volcanoes’.
Taking a step up from Hawaii we
can look at a volcano like Sakurajima
in southern Japan, which has been
erupting virtually every single day for
decades. This volcano produces more
viscous ‘andesite’ lavas, which trap gas
bubbles within them. Very simply, these
bubbles grow in size while trapped in
the thick magma, eventually bursting
at the surface, often resulting in an ex-
plosion of glowing fragments of lava.
Volcanoes such as this tend to produce
more ash and can cause more prob-
Icelandic Volcanism: Where, Why & How? By James Ashworth