they should import some hula dancers.
Krakatoa was a complete fraud … a publicity stunt concocted by the Dutch East India Company to spur investments from the rest of Europe. Doesn’t take much brown and grey spray paint to fool an eager audience.
What a hoot! Iceland calms down, and goddamn
**Papua New Guinea’s Tavurvurblows up.
** Wish I had just pitted big ass volcanoes in general now.
Bartharbunga if you want to skip those letters. ð is close enough to “th” in “this.”
Bárðarbunga for sleazy PM of Iceland!
Indeed! The lies are obvious if you just look at a map. East of Java, my ass!
It’s east if you go far enough…
As Pitting goes, this one is a complete failure. It’s erupting right now and air traffic over New Hampshire hasn’t been interrupted, the climate is still hostile, next winter will be a nightmare well within imagining and there never really was any suspension (volcanoes don’t need leaf springs or anything).
Boogerbunga is the wrong type of volcano for any big event. It lays along, and is part of, the mid-Atlantic ridge systems. This is “like” a big rip in the Earth’s fragile crust, where molten materials from the mantle[sup][1][/sup] can EASILY break through to the surface. Think of a meandering brook in some enchanted meadow with pixies and elves and unicorns prancing about.
Volcanoes that lie near subduction zones are the evil types, Vulcan when he’s angry with pathetic humans. Where tectonic plates grind past on another, great amount of friction builds up, melting the lower crustial materials[sup][2][/sup]. Thermal expansion causes a great amount of pressure to build and there’s just no place to release it, until the overburden of rock finally gives way. Think of a mass orgy in a downtown Seattle city park getting hit with 1200ºC pummy rock at 1400 km hr[sup]-1[/sup] while a 300 m tsunami rolls in with Big Foot attacking with M-60 machine guns.
… and you Pit unicorns …
[1] = I just made that up
[2] = I made this up too
[3] = Bigger than Luxembourg
[4] = I made THAT up as well
[5] = Citation
Looks like that big old volcano respected my pitting, and is calming the fuck down.
Yes, covered up very thoroughly . . .
You call spewing 300-foot high fountains of lava from fissures totaling two miles long ‘calming down’?
Seriously, though, the biggest worry currently is that the sub-glacial caldera that makes up the central Bardabunga volcano may collapse into the magma chamber below it. If that happens, it’s likely to make a fairly spectacular ‘bang’.
Yep. The cool thing about that? Due to how slow sound moves, we should know about it long before we hear it. In fact, we can calculate at what time it will hit. So it might not be a shocking surprise, but an awaited event.
That goddam nuclear winter that will follow, not so much.
Yeah, there have been more than a dozen 5.0 or larger quakes around the perimeter of the caldera since this whole thing started. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’m a bit amazed that it’s held together this long.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this is an old video. Most of Youtube is. 
In the tenth century, a Norseman named Bárður Bjarnason settled in northern Iceland with his nine sons. Conditions were rough, and Bjarnason decided to follow his sons south in search of more fertile land. His route, the story goes, stretched across Europe’s largest ice cap, Vatnajökull, and passed by several volcanoes, including one that he decided to name after himself. Blanketed in white, it probably looked much like it does today—a massive, radiant hump. Bjarnason, or one of his descendants, called the volcano Bárðarbunga. The name means “Bárður’s bulge.”
My enemy, she is beautiful.
And clearly not interested in going away anytime soon. The cubic miles of material just keep building there.