Iceland Volcano Eruption Update; Lava Builds Outside the Town of Grindavik 

As someone who lives in a country surrounded by walls keeping out dangerous liquids (the Netherlands), I can tell you that they're not really high enough to stop the wind... in fact, our country is quite windy.

They have a fissure that opened up on the outskirts of town that ended up burning a few houses to the ground. There is a 100% chance that the fissure opens up again, but next time, the whole damn town is engulfed in lava. No ifs, ands ,or buts ,about it.

with all the extra heat and smoke/ash/vapor boiling of into the atmosphere , prospects for our beautiful existence planet wide - sketchy

Well, the town IS built smack in the middle of the mid-Atlantic spreading ridge. The planet has kinda zoned that whole area as a crustal-creation industrial park for the last 180 million years. Maybe Iceland should just recognize that and relocate that town a few kilometers?

@@williamtomkiel8215 There are currenty 40 volcanoes erupting. The one in iceland is tiny, compared to most of the others.

@@williamtomkiel8215 Please. This has been going on for most of Earths existence and will continue to. It is like the weather, goes through cycles.

They built the town there. Time to move it away

The kaiju needs to make an *Entrance* so the town needs to stick around.🐲

A fissure did poke its head up just on the outskirts of town, which burnt a few houses to the ground. It's only a matter of time when that whole area including the Blue Lagoon, the power plant, and everything else is under fresh lava.

I think it is a matter of distance from the magma chamber meaning if the eruption finds a zone to the surface closer to the zone of accumulation that will be preferred as a conduit to the surface. However as lava piles up on the regions where closer vents have formed it is probably only a matter of time before Grindavik becomes the source of a more substantial fissure eruption.

'Has this correlated with spreading between the European and North American Plate, perhaps measured with GPS?' Sorry. But I am not sure that, that question makes sense'. If it does to you or others then fair enough. But I can not make sense of what you are asking. I looked to see if I could answer it. But could not work out what you asked. Could I suggest you review how you phase your question.

1) "Has this correlated with spreading between the European and North American Plate, perhaps measured with GPS?" On the local scale, yes, the horizontal x and y GPS data for stations in the area are showing exactly that. Most of the focus is on the vertical z-axis as that most indicates the current underlying magma volume, but the rest of the data is there and shows movement as well during the seismic events. On the global scale, no. At large scales, rock no longer behaves as a completely rigid solid, and small local stress changes do not cause notable bulk movement. Perhaps as an example, think of a crate placed on a wooden pallet. This event is like a small nail on the box digging slightly further into the pallet - locally, we see movement and deformation, across the whole pallet though, the shift in stresses is so minimal as to be unmeasurable. 2) "Are earthquakes around the world correlated with activity in Iceland with everything shuffling in fits and stops?" The impact area of a particular event depends on the size of the event, with larger events generally producing cascades of smaller ones. This event is too small to have noticable effects outside of the immediate area, and no large events have been close enough to cause noticable impact. Of course, 'butterfly effect's on systems do add up, but it's impossible to measure or predict that. 3) "Does this change the geoid and gravitational potentials at all?" The amount of material moved is fairly minimal. Spread out over the eruption area, which in the grand scale of things is not very large, there's only meters of lava - compare to the kilometers of depth to the magma chamber, for example. Any gravitational effects are likely only measurable pretty much on top of the lava flow/magma chamber, and the GPS data gives much more sensitive measurements of underlying movement anyways so I don't think anyone is keeping track of that.

@@MikeGreenwood51 I agree. Thank you

Three possibilities: 1. Using seismic sensors to create a tomographic map of the ground. Seismic waves travel faster through solid rock than liquid rock. 2. Create a map of the hypocenters of the earthquakes. I would not expect to see earthquakes originate from within the liquid, so there would be a gap in a map of the hypocenters. 3. Use ground tilt measurements to estimate the size of the expanding reservoir beneath. They would probably use multiple techniques to confirm their models.

I don't think this is measurable. Looking strictly at outflow doesn't take into account magma accumulations that don't erupt, or that rocks are compressible. There's also an issue about undersea activity that we can't monitor. There's no reason for there to be a balance. In the long term, the core of the earth is cooling while the sun gets about 10% brighter over a billion years. The equatorial bulge will slowly increase and never decrease, so even at a gross level, the shape and possibly the volume of the earth is changing. If you think about it, if a portion of a plate gets subducted, how many millions of years would it take for this mass to re-surface? An easier to measure number would be after a platelet is fully consumed, how long does it take for the added mass/pressure to stop causing eruptions?

@@icollectstories5702 thanks. Was thinking in terms of systems seeking equilibrium over a geological time frame. "There's no reason for there to be a balance" points to a closed system already in balance simply experiencing a change of state. Appreciate the reply.

@@yzenynot Yeah, if you cast your eyes skyward, or, better yet, see earth from space, you realize earth can't be a closed system. It's part of a universe that ages.

@@icollectstories5702 favorite poem is Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. Closed system in the same way a can of soup in a grocery system is singular within the store but part of the whole process. Terrestrial geology in evolution within the larger dynamics of celestial mechanics.

@@icollectstories5702 In terms of the how long does it take for crust to get recycled question if we use crude linear extrapolation of the measured rate of slab sinking within the mantle by seismic tomography Karin Sigloch's work seems to suggest it takes somewhere on the over or 230 million years for that bulk subducted crust to sink to the core mantle boundary. This is likely an over simplification since the subducted slabs appear to undergo several phase transitions due to increasing pressures driving out volatile element contents of the slab into the surrounding bulk mantle. Now decent is the easy direction due to gravity so the upwelling return circuit is likely far longer but this suggests that at the minimum we might be expecting something on the order of half a billion years for a full cycling of subducted bulk material. Volatiles can shortcut this circuit by separating out of the subducting slab but I'm assuming you are referring to the bulk silicate mass.

Congratulations 😃

Goon Tube blocking 70% of my comments, therefore, there could be hundreds of comments before you. 😉

YT shadow blocked most if my posts... so "zero" comments is about as accurate as a politician saying something accurate

@@bukboefidun9096 they only recently figured out how to correct the number of comments responding. Just took down my comments that Elon Musk is a military contractor. Take down every comment on "ItsHell" and it's war crimes.

Let’s get this party started!!

Yeah, living on an active plate divide is not on the top 10 smartest places to live…

For that which has happen, Is happening and is going to continue happening. Filling the cracks in a house must seem futile knowing the crack may be a cm lager tomorrow or by the end of the year.

@@MikeGreenwood51 the area is riddled with chasms and voids. There's old aerial footage before the town was built, and they just bulldozed dirt into them . They can open up instantly, so they're a serious problem. 👍

@@outlawbillionairez9780 Yikes, seems like the town was doomed from the start. The real issue is though, where else is there a good harbor in the area? Maybe its time to just take nature's cues and try to build a new one...

@@StuffandThings_ There's a small bay to the Northwest that could be made deeper. The harbor is exceptional, tho, and the government will fight to keep it, as long as people aren't living there. Their fear is a bunch of people getting wiped out in the middle of the night. Gov is buying town property, so I think they plan on relocating the town.

@@outlawbillionairez9780 How can there be "old aerial footage from before the town was built" given that Grindivik was founded in the year 934(CE/AD)? This isn't the US where towns are a few hundred years old at most but Europe where things have been inhabited for over a millennia. Why the invention of photography didn't occur until the the early 1800's so the town was over half the age of the Common Era when photography was first invented. Granted given what we know from geology yes the town was doomed and got lucky during the previous Mid Atlantic Ridge active interval that the area they chose was on the opposite side of the central Graben system of the ridge from where the previous eruptive cycle took place but I guarantee there were no photographs yet alone aerial photographs since neither of those existed in 934 AD. Now perhaps in hindsight Katla's Eldgjá eruption in 939 AD should have been a sign that this Island wasn't a good place to build but people are stubborn.

Its not a.i. Timothy is just i.

@Pau-tc9wj • Perhaps you should get your hearing checked. There seems to be a problem with it.

​@@keesvrins8410 very I

You try reporting on every single active volcano on earth pretty much daily and get every town and city name correct

How did he get the pronunciation wrong? Considering he's visited the town himself and knows people who lived there, I suspect he's doing it correctly.