Iceland Stands Down On Travel Alert: From Orange To Red and Back Again 29
Iceland's tiered system of air travel alerts went to orange last week, then to red with a believed under-ice eruption of the volcano beneath the Dyngjujokull glacier, but has now been eased back to orange. "Observations show that a sub-glacial eruption did not occur yesterday. The intense low-frequency seismic signal observed yesterday has therefore other explanations," the Icelandic Met Office said. The office had therefore decided to move the aviation warning code from red to orange, it said, but since there was no sign the seismic activity was slowing down, an eruption could still not be excluded. The national police commissioner said separately that all restrictions on aviation had been cancelled. Airspace of 140 by 100 nautical miles above the volcano had been closed to aircraft on Saturday.
OMG (Score:0, Funny)
It's Global Warming again!
Just let the deniers try to ignore this!
Re:is DHS aware of this? (Score:4, Funny)
Foreigners? It's our volcano. You're the foreigners.
FYI, it was our volcanologists who called the Met Office on their bad claim. Of course, they had every reason to think that there was an eruption, the earthquake and tremor activity has gotten so crazy it's higher than that seen during all but the most powerful eruptions in the area, and it's not even broken out of the ground yet. The amount of magma in motion there is just bonkers.
The best scenario at this point is a Krafla-style eruption - lava fountains slowly releasing the pressure over a decade, a nice "tourist eruption". The worst realistic scenario is a long-lasting, multiple vent fissure eruption stretching between Bárðarbunga and Askja, which would likely be one of our "Oh My God, Oh My God, We're All Going To Die!" eruptions that happen every 100-200 years on average.