First visit to Eyjafjallajökull

Luckily, my move to Iceland was scheduled to happen in the few days where the various airports crucial to my journey (Geneva - Frankfurt - Reykjavik) were outside the influcence area of the now famous plume from Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, and I landed within 5 minutes of the scheduled time. Four days later, I was on my way to one of the observation spots of the volcano, in the valley north of the edifice, relatively close to Þórólfsfelli where one of the webcams is located.

Already from the hills of the Western Rift Zone, just a few kilometers outside of Reykjavik, we could see the plume billowing high into the blue sky - to about 7 km, according to the information statement of the Nordic Volcanological Center. As we got closer, daylight started to get dimmer, allowing us to start seeing the glow of lava fountains at the source of the plume.

I have been fortunate to see quite a few volcanoes during the last 15 years or so - in various stages of activity and of explosivity. But this one most certainly wins the competition of the most powerful one. Actually seeing the plume developing above the crater , and the glowing volcanic bombs flying up what looked like at least one kilometer into the air, really helped to get a feel for the incredible amounts of ash discharged every minute of every hour of every day, and a better grasp of the reason why the european airspace has been encoutering so many issues. Below you can see a satellite picture of the plume, taken roughly at the same time as I was standing there watching and taking my own pictures (Picture by Ingibjörg Jónsdóttir from the University of Iceland - check out the amazing collection of
satellite pictures of the eruption on her webpage) - and at the same time, many airports in Ireland, Spain and subsequently the UK were closed. Preliminary estimates of the magma discharge (= volume of lava actually ejected out of the volcano) were about 300 m³ per second (reported by the British Geological Survey quoting scientists of the Earth Science Insitute at the University of Iceland). That's the volume of a nice size 2-storey house every second. Or the volume of the Empire State Building every hour. Of course, not all of it is carried into the plume, and it appears that a little less than half of the material is being deposited on the crater immediately. Some of the ash falls from the plume along the way, causing a lot of damage for the population and the cattle - a couple of days ago the schools were closed below the trajectory of the plume in Iceland.

How will it evolve? No one really knows. At this point, people from the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland, as well as many other people in Iceland and scientists all over the world are working like bees to try and collect as much data as possible - seismic tremors and earthquakes which can tell how the magma moves beneath the surface to the deep roots of the volcano, ground deformation (using GPS) which occurs as material is being displaced below the ground (during the course of the eruption, the ground has moved by over 6 cm in certain locations..!) , ash chemistry which is an indication of the composition of the magma erupted, chemical characteristics of rivers around the volcano, as well as satellite pictures of the plume - all of these data are put together and there is an eruption meeting every 2-3 days at the Institute of Earth Sciences to ensure people from all disciplines are talking to each other, hoping every time something changes to learn a little something about the plumbing of the volcano, the eruptive processes and the consequences thereof on people's lives.