The country of Iceland is one of the most volcanically active pieces of real estate on the planet and is a godsend for any volcanologists, perched atop the mid-ocean ridge fault line (a divergent tectonic plate boundary between the American and Eurasian plates) this small island has more active volcanoes per square km than anywhere else.
Due to this the tourist trade is very productive with people flocking from all over the globe to wonder at this beautiful island, gushing geysers and boiling pools of sulphur enriched water invite anybody to witness what the world might have looked like at the very beginning. This island is basically one large cluster of volcanoes and due to its location high in the earth’s Northern hemisphere they only receive limited sunlight during the winter months so the vegetation is sparse, you will be hard pushed to find a tree anywhere on Iceland except maybe at Christmas.
There are currently over 200 volcanoes but only 30 of these city destroying monster pose any threat. At present 7 of them are fully active, luckily only minor eruptions have occurred over the last 100 years.
The most recent eruption was in May of 2011 when the volcano Grimsvtn let forth its fury and spewed enough ash to ground flights all over Northern Europe for 5 days. This was the second recent event in the last 4 years, the other being the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in 2010. Eyjafjallajokull ( which means island mountain glacier) was more disruptive to air traffic and caused chaos for nearly two weeks with over 100,00 flights cancelled, billowing ash to 33,000 feet in the air and spreading over 1,000 miles across Europe. This event becomes insignificant when you think that the volcano Katla erupted in 1918 and produced five times as much ash and caused trade disruption for nearly 3 months.
There have been 125 eruptions since the colony settled on Iceland in AD 874, the most destructive was the Laki volcano in 1783 which tore a chain of giant craters in the Earth and killing a quarter of Iceland inhabitants due to fire, disease, and ash. This volcano is also thought to have produced 2.9 cubic miles of lava, the most from a single event in world history.
Many Icelandic eruptions have offered important and ground breaking discoveries and scientific insights. Between 1963 and 1967, for instance, an underwater volcano 20 miles south of the mainland ejected enough lava to form a new land mass, which Iceland named Surtsey. Since it’s rare for volcanoes to make permanent new islands, Surtsey has offered an important opportunity for scientists to investigate and study this geological event. Surtsey has also been an invaluable research location for biologists to monitor and categorize the arrival of colonizing species to a barren new island.
These are the most active volcanoes to date; Krafla, Askja, Bardarbunga, Grimsvotn, Hekla, Vestmannaeyjar, and Katla. As you can see by the map these all follow the North South fault line bisecting Iceland, the more these tectonic plates are pulled apart then the more volcanic activity we will have to face.
The people of Iceland have come to expect these incidents and for most part are prepared to deal with them as best they can, unfortunately sooner or later there will be an eruption of such magnitude that even these brave souls will not be able to overcome, it could be this year or in the next millennium, know body knows but it will come.
Many thanks go to www.volcanodiscovery.com & www.exploratorium.edu for their wonderful insight helping me write this article. Also thank you to www.feww.files.wordpress.com for their illustration.
