Western Standard - December 19, 2023


Iceland declares state of emergency after epic volcano eruption

Mentioned
Svartsengi
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

153.2

Word count

646

Sentence count

35


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Iceland is home to more than 130 volcanoes across more than 30 volcanic systems. And right now, lava is erupting out of the Svartsengi volcanic system, located in the Reykjanes peninsula of southwest Iceland. This style of eruption differs somewhat from the kind of popular culture explosions that you might see in popular culture. Here s why this eruption looks so different and what threats it poses.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 These are some of the scenes in the Reykjanes peninsula of Iceland after a volcanic eruption began expelling lava in the region.
00:00:10.000 This style of eruption differs somewhat from the kind of popular culture explosions that you might see.
00:00:23.000 Here's why this eruption looks so different and what threats it poses.
00:00:27.000 Iceland is home to more than 130 volcanoes across more than 30 volcanic systems.
00:00:34.000 And right now, lava is erupting out of the Svartsengi volcanic system, located in the Reykjanes peninsula of southwest Iceland.
00:00:42.000 In a traditional volcano, the volcanic material funnels through a central vent typically.
00:00:48.000 Like in those volcanoes that you ideate in Hollywood, where there is a mountain and a conical peak and the summit and everything like flows out of the summit.
00:00:58.000 Whether that's an ash boom that explodes explosively into the sky or whether the lava comes up and out of the center and like leaks down the side of the mountain.
00:01:06.000 Here, it's not like that.
00:01:08.000 Instead, in this type of eruption, known as a fissure eruption, lava basically oozes from cracks in the ground.
00:01:15.000 And the type of lava typically involved in these two kinds of eruptions also looks different.
00:01:20.000 An explosive eruption is often due to viscous, sticky magma that doesn't flow easily.
00:01:26.000 While a fissure eruption pushes out fluid and runny magma that spreads across the landscape.
00:01:31.000 The big danger with these is that these lava flows can spread out quite a long way.
00:01:37.000 And obviously, as we're seeing in Iceland right now, that poses a threat to both the infrastructure in the region and people's lives.
00:01:46.000 The eruption from the Svartsengi volcanic system occurred near Grindavik, an Icelandic fishing town.
00:01:52.000 The surrounding area is home to a major airport, one of the country's most popular tourist attractions, the Blue Lagoon,
00:01:59.000 and a power plant that provides hot water for the majority of the peninsula.
00:02:05.000 Eruptions in this part of Iceland have been increasing steadily in recent years after a very long dormant period.
00:02:12.000 This is just an area of Iceland that goes through these periodic eras of on and off eruption activity and then quiescence.
00:02:21.000 So, like, around a millennia or so, the peninsula is quiet.
00:02:24.000 You don't see volcanic activity.
00:02:26.000 And then it starts up.
00:02:28.000 And then that era of volcanic activity lasts for centuries.
00:02:35.000 Iceland sits on top of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, making it a hotbed of seismic and volcanic activity.
00:02:43.000 When the tectonic plates slip past one another, earthquakes occur.
00:02:47.000 And as the plates spread apart, magma can leak up to the surface, generating volcanic eruptions.
00:02:54.000 The focus of sort of monitoring efforts of volcanic systems is around trying to identify as early as possible any precursory signals that sort of come before the onset of an eruption.
00:03:07.000 And in instances like what we're seeing in Iceland, these eruptions are typically heralded by the sort of really high levels of seismic activity to try and really tell us where there might be an eruption and sort of where ongoing intrusions are going.
00:03:26.000 It remains to be seen how the lava erupting from the Svartsengi volcanic system will impact residents in the surrounding area.
00:03:33.000 But the risk of volcanic activity also comes with benefits for the Icelandic community.
00:03:39.000 Every expert from Iceland who I spoke with was very proud of the fact that the country uses their volcanoes in a constructive way.
00:03:48.000 They harness geothermal energy from them to generate electricity and heat their water and heat their homes.
00:03:54.000 And they don't need to buy oil to do those things because they're exploiting their volcanoes, basically.
00:04:00.000 But of course, the trade off there is in order to exploit them best, you have to be close to them.
00:04:05.000 And if you're close to them, eventually an eruption will threaten homes, threaten towns and cities and with risks come benefits.