I have found geology professor Shawn Willsey's YouTube channel to have high value, no drama interpretations of the situation in Grindavik. He has been posting 1-2 videos per day for the past few days as new information arises.
This is a much better introduction to what has happened this week; the original article gives absolutely no context about the related volcanic activity.
TLDR; Grindavík is located in Iceland, a country known for its volcanic activity. Earthquakes and land deformation have exploded in frequency in the area under and around the small town of 4,000 people and geologists expect a volcanic eruption is imminent. The town has been evacuated.
To add a note that while 4000 people is a small town almost anywhere, it is over 1% of Iceland's population. So the impact on the country is non negligible. My 2c.
Keflavík is obviously the only major international airport in Iceland though.
A while back I remember hearing a proposal about expanding the airport in Egilsstaðir to be capable of replacing Keflavík if (when?) it is disrupted by lava flow. I think it proved too expensive for much action to be taken though. It would be interesting logistically to see what would happen if Keflavík was knocked out of service.
I wonder how many airports in the world are at such significant risk of "lava flow" and other catastrophic natural disasters.
I actually see Tampa International this way. Its literally on the coast, and just barely missed near two near Cat-5 hurricanes in two years. And that risk is not shrinking.
> I wonder how many airports in the world are at such significant risk of "lava flow" and other catastrophic natural disasters
It looks like Kilauea lava flows in the 1880s came within a mile or two of the site of Hilo International Airport. Lava flows earlier this year were heading in that direction.
It also appears as though the airport was hit by tsunamis in the 1950s and 1960s.
Closer to 9 miles (15km). That's plenty (even though it doesn't sound like much), considering what kind of eruption this would be and how the fault lines lie.
Experts aren't worried about the airport. The main concern (besides the town) is the Svartsengi geothermal plant. If that is destroyed you will have 30.000 people without heating.
I actually watch Shawn Willsey's content for everything but this topic. I find his Grindavik coverage isn't that great. It's overlong, over-speculative, and sometimes missed more current or extended information available elsewhere. Some of this I think is due to his being a relatively newer YouTuber (in terms of gaining traction) and his personal interest in Iceland: to be clear, its not that he's disingenuous or unqualified... its more that he's not yet crafted a public presentation style which fits the medium better. However his roadcut geology series is interesting even if you're only getting his on the spot opinions of what he's observing.
By far, the best source about what's going on in Grindavik I've found is just the Icelandic Meteorological Office website: https://en.vedur.is/ (English version, which is quite good). That in combination with some residents of Iceland that post shorter updates the keeps close to the reported local news seems to be the best.
He starts off with saying that "there is a line of magma that is 15km long and 9 miles in length."
Do you know why he would mix metrics like that?
Edit: he's talking about a rectangle and his wording, to me, implied that he was using X/Y coordinates to talk about how big the rectangle is. Except that it sounded like he was mixing metrics. Other commenters suggest that he's just trying to help us dumb Americans. That could make sense too, but wasn't obvious in his wording to me. 15km ~= 9 miles, I should have done that math. =)
In the last hour they have detected increased levels of SO2 in Grindavik, so they've evacuated residents who were being allowed in to retrieve their valuables:
That's pretty close to Blue Lagoon, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the area, which is now closed as a precaution: https://www.bluelagoon.com/seismic-activity
Maybe. Avoided it. Went to Mývatn instead. Turned out that it means midge-lake. Spent 2 days eating flies. They didn't bite but weren't tasty. I've never driven the fuck out of somewhere so quickly.
Well, Myvatn is basically on the other side of the island... Cam only recommend the non-Blue Lagoon hot baths and tubs, easily as good and a lot cheaper.
Maybe, but the surreal atmosphere when the sun rises, you are surrounded by blue everywhere, you are jetlagged from just having landed half hour ago, and you have a drink in hand is indescribable. I went to other Icelandic baths during my stay but nothing matched that experience.
Note that the Icelandic edition [1] understandably gets more frequent and timely updates than the others. If you're ready to put up with the quirks of machine translation, there's a lot more information there to see.
Your comment prompted me to look up how many Poles live in Iceland. Turns out they are the largest minority which is mildly surprising but shouldn’t be I guess.
When I started reading RÚV I wondered what the red and white flag was. My mind tried with “Greenland”, but Greenland because of the Nordic affiliation, but Greenland itself has a population of less than 60k, so how many greenlanders could there be in Iceland?
When the flag turned out to be Polish I had to turn to the Woodchuck Book and was surprised, just like you. I should have mentioned it. Thanks for the link.
There's a non-zero risk of it going off in the ocean, which could cause ash fallout, depending on the magnitude of the blast.
Property and infrastructure damage is not the only outcome here. We could end up with ash fallout and flight disruptions. There's also a major power station in the immediate risk zone, which is a major loss if it gets destroyed.
If and when this blows up, it's going to be big.
The question is just if it's big and causes fallout, or just big. And when we're talking about property damage, it's less damage and more "will the town be obliterated or not". The magma is most shallow under the town, and there's a 15 kilometer magma pipe extending to the ocean. So the possibility of the eruption happening in Grindavik itself is also very real.
2010 showed what kinds of impacts can occur when a volcano erupts in Iceland. [1]
> In response to concerns that volcanic ash ejected during the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland would damage aircraft engines, the controlled airspace of many European countries was closed to instrument flight rules traffic, resulting in what at the time was the largest air-traffic shut-down since World War II.
> On 16 April 2010, 16,000 of Europe's usual 28,000 daily scheduled passenger flights were cancelled and on the following day 16,000 of the usual 22,000 flights were cancelled. By 21 April 95,000 flights had been cancelled.
> IATA stated that the total loss for the airline industry was around US$1.7 billion (£1.1 billion, €1.3 billion).
Eyjafjallajökull was a special case, it was not an oceanic blast, but a blast under a glacier. Fjallajökull means "glacier mountain". The blast flash-melted several tones of ice, which caused the lava to cool rapidly forming the ash cloud. If my memory serves, the glacier was in the caldera itself.
But the effect would be very similar. The water would vaporize and create an aerosol of ash.
I can tell you for sure there are no such heated roads in Grindavík. The one in Reykjavík is on a street that cars can drive down, but in practice don't very often. Large plows would struggle there and the pushed off snow would clog the walking areas in a very popular tourism ___location.
> When the volcano blows, it should only be property, building, and road damage.
People had the option to get their animals, but not everyone did so. If the eruption destroys the town some animals will be among the casualties, if they haven't starved etc. already.
Not that it's quite the same, but I wonder how common it is to have a place struck off of official maps and signs for safety purposes? I know of one, Wittenoom[0] in Australia, which was removed due to being heavily contaminated with asbestos, but I wonder what other examples are out there.
It is the usual way of denoting that there is no turn right which leads to the designated ___location. Usually because of some road closure. Of course here it has a strange vibe to it.
This is an American interpretation. Here in the US, cones, lights, or lane-blockers are used to close exits.
Culturally, its because American's won't read a sign and follow the instructions if we can still "do" it. You have to physically block us, and its too expensive to change all the signs.
Nah, it's actually the same here in Germany too - I live near a railway crossing which was recently rebuilt and couldn't be used for a few weeks. The "strike-through" at the intersection was just the first step, then there was a first barrier blocking half the street, with a sign "residents only", and then a bit later a second barrier, but still some people just absolutely had to drive past all those barriers until they were literally in the middle of the construction site to find out that no, it's really not possible to cross the tracks...
My favorite is Chicago's reversible express lanes, which have thirteen physical gates you have to blow through in order go to the wrong way. I always wonder if they add another set every time someone still drives through them all.
They aren’t closing the exit though as it’s needed so people can get down there for quite a few reasons. There are actual manned roadblocks a bit further in.
I wonder if this is a fiction genre. Can I read a book that starts with a happy town with not much going on, builds up to just before a catastrophe, and then ends? Maybe like Part 1 of Seveneves.
I read this book recently: https://www.amazon.com/Anomaly-Novel-Herv%C3%A9-Tellier/dp/1... - don't want to give away too much (that's why I'm not linking to the Wikipedia article), but it fits the genre you are proposing - except spanning the entire world, not just a town.
I looked at a few books on this list, but not every book seems to really be about pre-apocalypse. Pre-Apocalyptic fictions sounds like literary edging :D
That was my hope for Fear the Walking Dead, a show about society collapses under a zombie apocalypse. Instead we got some hints in a pre-zombie LA, went straight to a cordoned of quarantine zone and a time jump to "now the world, except your little suburb, went to hell". Seems writing convincing stories about why everything would collapse is a lot harder than stories set after an assumed collapse.
“The Doomsday Book” by Connie Willis kind of has that feeling for a while. I couldn’t really get into it, though; it’s undeniably a well-written book, just not the kind of book I wanted to read.
Just FYI, the past tense of "strike" is "struck", not "stroke". It could be argued that it should be "stroke" to parallel words like "break-broke" and "wake-woke" but it's not. English is weird. (And the past tense of "hike" is "hiked", not "huck" nor "hoke", which aren't words at all [UPDATE - turns out they are, see child comment from u/GrinningFool], but they probably should be.)
“Struck” is the general past participle of “strike", “stricken” is a past participle available specifically for the sense of removing from a list (but the general form “struck” is also correct and often used for that sense, too.)
It's not that narrow - e.g. "was stricken by a sense of foreboding"
You also would say panic-stricken, not panic-struck.
Agree it's not universal though, helpfully, and sometimes is it "struck" in non adjectival past participle.
But not in the OP case, I think (much like striking off a list, striking off a sign). I probably should have mentioned that it wasn't universal for struck though.
Same. Wife and I went for New Years this year and it was by far one of the most satisfying vacations I've ever taken. Absolutely nothing about the place is overrated, and we lament how little of it we've experienced.
It is as close to magic as anywhere I've been, and their New Year celebration is insanity.
I went up to the hill in the center of Reykjavik for New Years and was astonished, completely astonished by the amount of fireworks that could be seen.
If you can, see if you can get to a bonfire a few hours beforehand. Travel / tourism agencies can arrange this.
Also, if you'd enjoy seeing the Aurora Borealis, know that due to weather, clouds, etc., it isn't very reliable, and it may be best to plan on multiple attempts at it. The experiences we had ranged from disappointing to terrifically amazing, but if we'd only gone the one time, we'd have left without having experienced it.
We visited in January 2017 and I'd love to go back when there's more than 5 hours of daylight. The trip was spectacular. And it's an easy flight from DC and 5 nights was plenty to hit most of the easy tourist spots.
Winter is the ideal time to go northern lights hunting. Either way, I've been propably too often, 5 times by now, twice in summer including one highland crossing, and three times in winter. My recomondation would be, if budget and vacation time allows, to visit Iceland once in summer and once in winter.
What's interesting to see in the pictures is that they already built a detour around the fissure: it starts in the area of fresh asphalt to the right of the guy in this photo https://cdn.mbl.is/frimg/1/45/18/1451863.jpg, then goes through an also freshly paved-over parking lot/former green space and rejoins the road in the background (behind the construction fences).
I think you are misinterpreting this photo. Nobody has been paving over the fissures in the town. I think it's a combination of moisture, different coloured asphalt sections, and light/shadows that tricks the eye. As you can see in this drone footage [1] the car park asphalt is darker, and the hot water pipes ruptured in the ground create steam that spreads moisture over the asphalt, making it darker. Also, you have a building next to the car park which makes it even darker than the street.
I hear in Japan the reason they have electric wires on poles and houses have individual gas cylinders is to provide resiliency during earthquakes -- the earth becomes a liquid.
Electric wires on poles are also more likely to get damaged by wind, ice, fire, and flood, either directly or by trees falling onto them. There are tradeoffs involved.
Getting OT but I've noticed in Scandinavian countries they use pavers a lot where in the USA we'd more likely have poured concrete or asphalt/tarmac. Sidewalks, parking surfaces, driveways, etc.
Pavers would seem to me to be both more expensive to install and require higher maintenance. Is there a reason they are used so much?
Purely a guess on my part: concrete or asphalt will be destroyed by frost heave[1] and be difficult to patch well, while pavers will endure it better and are easier to restore.
There are machines that are super fast at laying them. And digging them up and replacing them is a lot less disruptive than asphalt. Plus it makes cars drive a bit slower. And they drain naturally
We have electric wires on poles in the northeast US, too—largely because the ground freezes solid for several months of the year.
It's not that unusual a precaution.
(Though yes, as a sibling commenter notes, we do have to deal with them getting taken down by wind, lightning, and the occasional hapless driver from time to time. There's no perfect solution.)
My guess is that it's more likely due to the cost of digging/right of way, etc. It gets significantly cold here in MN and most powerlines are underground, but we have a lot of open space.
A statistic I remember from when I lived there is that Connecticut has more trees per mile of powerline than any other state. Every time there was an ice storm, thousands of people lost power.
That very much depends on which part of Sweden you're talking about. Around most cities they are buried but in the countryside 'luftledning' - literally 'air cable', denoting cabled hung on impregnated wooden poles - is still more the norm than the exception. Where I live (about 60 km north of Göteborg) Vattenfall has been talking about burying those cables for decades but they're still there and regularly are taken down by trees, errant drivers and similar mishaps.
Very interesting! Now I have to think how this could be used to make something productive! :D Maybe some sort of special bearing floating on the fludized sand you can turn of and stop/stabilize by turning thr gas pipe off ?
The 1783 Laki eruption comes to my mind. Back then, a 25km long fissure with 130 vents opened. About 14km3 of lava and 1km3 of tephra was emitted. Lava fountains were estimated to have reached between 800m and 1400m.
Some 20-25% of the population died, 50% of cattle and 50% of the horse population perished.
It is argued that this eruption was the catalyst for the French Revolution, as the amount of emitted gasses caused extreme weather patterns across Europe (and the world) throughout the 1780s leading to famine, diseases and social unrest.
In contemporary times, there's the 1973 eruption of Eldfell on the island of Heimaey. It destroyed some 400 homes and led to a temporary evacuation of some 5.300 inhabitants. By 1975, some 80% of the population had returned. Moreover, today it's the foremost fishing center of Island with over 1/3rd of the total fish catch originating from its harbor.
>The parish minister and provost of Vestur-Skaftafellssýsla, Jón Steingrímsson (1728–1791), grew famous for the eldmessa [ˈɛltˌmɛsːa] ("fire mass") that he delivered on 20 July 1783.
I looked this up, and found this: "In his introduction to the translation Guðmundur E. Sigvaldson classifies Jón’s Eldritið as a “scientific classic as well is a literary jewel.” [0]
It chronicles the aftermath of the eruption in some detail (i.e. people did not flee the region, for some reason....), e.g.:
>The poisonous compounds leaked out of the Laki craters caused, as Jón depicts so graphically, the skin to rot off the spines of horses, swelling in their heads, jaws, and joints, rotting insides, and shrinking bones. The sheep and cattle suffered similarly. The meat from these animals was “both foul-smelling and bitter and full of poison, so that many a person died as a result of eating it” (Fires of the Earth, 76).
IIRC, they also used the remaining solid lava flow for district heating for a while so that it cooled down faster and could be trucked out of the way where necessary.
Is there documentation for this? Icelanders are Christian (since when, I'm not sure), and would more likely pray. Also I don't think there is a history of human sacrifice in Norway/Denmark/Scandinavia.
Does anyone know how the large datacenters in Iceland are faring?
I know that most of the big ones are north east (near the international airport in Keflavík).
They were really popular for crypto miners, but have been moving into HPC very rapidly. I’d assume there is a ton of extremely expensive equipment less than 10-15 miles from where all this activity is.
Edit: I see that it looks like they have but residents will be allowed in to retrieve belongings. Is there any chance that an eruption comes in the form of a large scale collapse above the magma chamber…or is that not plausible?
While anything's possible, the trend of recent eruptions in the Reykjanes peninsula have been more of the slow trickling small kind. They have also been relatively off the beaten path, so it's hard to compare ground shifting in the previous places since you likely wouldn't notice it after the fact like you will with pavement and buildings.
It only needs a small scale collapse if your house is standing over the sinkhole while you're inside, so evacuation is probably still the safest bet...
Oh yeah, I wasn’t meaning to suggest that evacuation might not be the correct course, it seems at this point not doing so would be irresponsible. Was just curious about the possibility of something very large occurring given the sinking above the chamber.
Any public data on this? I would love to collab on some predictive modeling for cases like this. There are some sources but couldn't find anything comprehensive enough to be accurate, need more historical context comparisons etc.
Most likely wind. However this thread was from Friday and the ground was constantly shaking that day. I was there and there were rather large earthquakes like every 10-20 minutes (and smaller earthquakes every 20-30 seconds) between 16:00 and 23:00 (when I evacuated). It is highly likely that the poster in this thread was actually seeing earthquakes.
Earthquakes aren't uncommon, but what's happening in Grindavik is more than a earthquake. They were having hundreds of quakes an hour, a fissure opened and magma might come up soon. All in a little town and near a geothermal power plant which also fuels the Blue Lagoon. This also isn't super far from the main airport and the road that leads to it.
During Covid a new volcano erupted quite near Grindavik, that was very tourist friendly: close to Reykjavik, not too large or dangerous, nothing it could damage nearby, a few km hiking from a road. Many web cams were setup and lots of beautiful drone footage was uploaded to YouTube as well. It erupted again 2021 and 2022. So it's a well known volcano now to the Internet public.
Now it seems there will be an eruption on the same fissure again, but a) there are many more earthquakes than before, b) the detected movement of magma is far larger, and c) it could erupt anywhere on a 15km fissure line, but right now it seems to do so right in the middle of the nearby town. So it looks like this time it will be a disaster.
There is also a geothermal power plant that heats the whole peninsula nearby, as well as tourist attraction the Blue Lagoon, that are both at risk.
You aren't wrong, but the topic of interest here is the volcanic eruption. They are also relatively common compared to elsewhere in the world, but most are small and not in populated areas. See: https://www.visiticeland.com/eruption/
They are and they tend to be small because of the type of plate boundary they’re associated with. But when they’re coming in large swarms near a volcano which is the case here, it’s a pretty strong signal of an impending eruption.
Looking for Grindavik news on X etc right now, there is already an annoying amount of video and images of erupting volcanoes, from previous years, or from somewhere else completely. Even though there is no eruption at all yet. Annoying.
Reminds me of nearly every time there is an aircraft incident with, say a 737 but the media show a stock photo of a completely different plane that has 4 engines.
Instead of becoming a more reliable source of news, thanks to ad payouts and the resulting engagement farming by blue checkmarks Twitter/X is becoming increasingly less reliable.
Am I using a different Twitter? I only see local videos no "annoying amount of video and images of erupting volcanoes, from previous years, or from somewhere else completely"
You can watch the live cams on RÚV.is or the tv channel ruv2 that streams from there. That way you also get RÚV radio sound, with their great music choices that now clash with the night images…
HN has plenty of flaws and cultural issues, but the stated intention here is to promote discussion, not "user engagement". Where Twitter/X promotes outright lies, here I typically take more issue with folks' lenses and biases. tl;dr: I trust HN orders of magnitude more than Twitter and crew.
Is Ycombinator paying out to their "content generators" here?
Also, while I can imagine one's HN reputation helping someone a job or find a venture partner in this little bubble, there is no comparison with Xitter's reach.
It's not a bizarre comment. "Freedom of speech" is used in this case ironically, as a metonymy for the site's drastically decreasing quality since it was acquired by someone who strongly advocated for it during the site's acquisition.
https://youtu.be/xvlZOpZE2KE?si=c2_Ew7LDKHrEpoN9