Pirate's Cove

All because you had to drive a fossil fueled vehicle and eat meat

Glaciers are melting. It may reawaken the world’s most dangerous volcanoes

A powerful swarm of earthquakes in January suggested one of Iceland’s giant “ice volcanoes” may be awakening after a decade of slumber. In the months that followed, more earthquakes have rocked the ground.

They are a sign that hot, viscous magma is flowing to the roots of Bardarbunga, which lies beneath Europe’s largest glacier Vatnajökull. It’s not a matter of if Bardarbunga erupts, but when — and it could be a big one.

Scientists in Iceland have their eyes on this volcano, along with others nestled under the frozen landscape — roughly half of the country’s 34 active volcanic systems are covered in ice. They are trying to unravel whether a decades-old theory could be correct: that retreating ice, fueled by the climate crisis, is triggering more frequent and more explosive volcanic eruptions.

At the heart of this quest is an effort to understand how the planet functions at a fundamental level, and how what humans are doing at the surface — namely, warming the Earth — could be interacting with natural processes deep beneath the ground.

It’s “a connection that we haven’t always understood,” said Ben Edwards, a professor of geosciences at Dickinson College.

And they still don’t understand, they’re just hypothesizing, fear mongering, without realizing that Iceland was created by volcanoes around 16 million years ago, being on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. That volcanoes have happened. The Vikings freaked when one went off not long after they landed, and they built walls and sacrificed birds and things to the fire god Surtr (I don’t like that this article includes “satanic”, has nothing to do with Vikings). And the eruption stopped, so, the sacrifices and such seemed to work. Anyhow, Iceland is volcanic!

About 15,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, the country was enveloped in a thick ice sheet. Over the course of just a few thousand years, much of it disappeared, forging a new landscape. Glaciers now cover only around 10% of Iceland.

When the ice vanished, something unusual followed. There was a pulse of volcanic activity, with eruption rates increasing an estimated 30- to 50-fold, said Michelle Parks, coordinator of volcano deformation monitoring at the Icelandic Meteorological Office. This increased volcanic activity lasted roughly 1,500 years.

Now the remaining ice is retreating rapidly, this time driven by human-caused climate change, and Parks and other scientists are trying to figure out if this effect might happen again.

See? This time it is your fault.