A Lot of Damage in Grindavík | Hacker News Reader

A Lot of Damage in Grindavík

icelandmonitor.mbl.is

308 pointsperihelions154 comments

I have found geology professor Shawn Willsey's YouTube channel to have high value, no drama interpretations of the situation in Grindavik. He has been posting 1-2 videos per day for the past few days as new information arises.

https://youtu.be/xvlZOpZE2KE?si=c2_Ew7LDKHrEpoN9

This is a much better introduction to what has happened this week; the original article gives absolutely no context about the related volcanic activity.

TLDR; Grindavík is located in Iceland, a country known for its volcanic activity. Earthquakes and land deformation have exploded in frequency in the area under and around the small town of 4,000 people and geologists expect a volcanic eruption is imminent. The town has been evacuated.

To add a note that while 4000 people is a small town almost anywhere, it is over 1% of Iceland's population. So the impact on the country is non negligible. My 2c.

It also sits about 5 miles from Iceland's only international airport, so could prove especially disruptive to the entire nation.

> Iceland's only international airport

That's not strictly the case. For example, Akureyri has some international flights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akureyri_Airport

Keflavík is obviously the only major international airport in Iceland though.

A while back I remember hearing a proposal about expanding the airport in Egilsstaðir to be capable of replacing Keflavík if (when?) it is disrupted by lava flow. I think it proved too expensive for much action to be taken though. It would be interesting logistically to see what would happen if Keflavík was knocked out of service.

I wonder how many airports in the world are at such significant risk of "lava flow" and other catastrophic natural disasters.

I actually see Tampa International this way. Its literally on the coast, and just barely missed near two near Cat-5 hurricanes in two years. And that risk is not shrinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Mount_Nyiragongo_eruption

Lava flows came very close to Goma airport

> I wonder how many airports in the world are at such significant risk of "lava flow" and other catastrophic natural disasters

It looks like Kilauea lava flows in the 1880s came within a mile or two of the site of Hilo International Airport. Lava flows earlier this year were heading in that direction.

It also appears as though the airport was hit by tsunamis in the 1950s and 1960s.

REK can also handle most jets if necessary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reykjav%C3%ADk_Airport

> I think it proved too expensive for much action to be taken though.

Iceland beginning, let alone completing, a major infrastructure project in the 21st century? Impossible.

What’s the issue? Iceland seems pretty good at infrastructure.

Closer to 9 miles (15km). That's plenty (even though it doesn't sound like much), considering what kind of eruption this would be and how the fault lines lie.

Experts aren't worried about the airport. The main concern (besides the town) is the Svartsengi geothermal plant. If that is destroyed you will have 30.000 people without heating.

He starts off with saying that "there is a line of magma that is 15km long and 9 miles in length."

Do you know why he would mix metrics like that?

Edit: he's talking about a rectangle and his wording, to me, implied that he was using X/Y coordinates to talk about how big the rectangle is. Except that it sounded like he was mixing metrics. Other commenters suggest that he's just trying to help us dumb Americans. That could make sense too, but wasn't obvious in his wording to me. 15km ~= 9 miles, I should have done that math. =)

Isn’t he just trying to explain it for a wide audience? He‘s just translating units here.

For the benefit of the American viewers, who might not immediately know what 15km are.

> 15km long and 9 miles in length

This is not mixing. He's just presenting the length in two different measurement systems.

That does read weird

"15km long, or 9miles"

Would be much better

The mixing of 'length' and 'long' was odd.

If he had said 15km long and 9 miles wide my head would've exploded

  > He starts off with saying that "there is a line of magma that is 15km long and 9 miles in length."

The real explanation is rather prosaic: bad transcription. He doesn't use the word "and."

An accurate transcription would be:

  > there is a line of magma that is 15 km long—about 9 miles in length.

He's just (parenthetically) converting the units.

I actually watch Shawn Willsey's content for everything but this topic. I find his Grindavik coverage isn't that great. It's overlong, over-speculative, and sometimes missed more current or extended information available elsewhere. Some of this I think is due to his being a relatively newer YouTuber (in terms of gaining traction) and his personal interest in Iceland: to be clear, its not that he's disingenuous or unqualified... its more that he's not yet crafted a public presentation style which fits the medium better. However his roadcut geology series is interesting even if you're only getting his on the spot opinions of what he's observing.

By far, the best source about what's going on in Grindavik I've found is just the Icelandic Meteorological Office website: https://en.vedur.is/ (English version, which is quite good). That in combination with some residents of Iceland that post shorter updates the keeps close to the reported local news seems to be the best.

In the last hour they have detected increased levels of SO2 in Grindavik, so they've evacuated residents who were being allowed in to retrieve their valuables:

https://www.ruv.is/english/2023-11-10-liveblog-reykjanes-pen...

No signs of an actual eruption yet though on the cameras (the steam is a geothermal power station): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=804nPrAUAxg

That's pretty close to Blue Lagoon, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the area, which is now closed as a precaution: https://www.bluelagoon.com/seismic-activity

It's also a waste of time tourist trap. The normal Icelandic baths are much cheaper and just as good.

Maybe. Avoided it. Went to Mývatn instead. Turned out that it means midge-lake. Spent 2 days eating flies. They didn't bite but weren't tasty. I've never driven the fuck out of somewhere so quickly.

Well, Myvatn is basically on the other side of the island... Cam only recommend the non-Blue Lagoon hot baths and tubs, easily as good and a lot cheaper.

Maybe, but the surreal atmosphere when the sun rises, you are surrounded by blue everywhere, you are jetlagged from just having landed half hour ago, and you have a drink in hand is indescribable. I went to other Icelandic baths during my stay but nothing matched that experience.

Not just as good, but better. There are no morons around you who are constantly live streaming.

RÚV has a liveblog with the latest news about the situation in English, Icelandic and Polish: https://www.ruv.is/english/2023-11-10-liveblog-reykjanes-pen...

Note that the Icelandic edition [1] understandably gets more frequent and timely updates than the others. If you're ready to put up with the quirks of machine translation, there's a lot more information there to see.

[1] https://www.ruv.is/frettir/innlent/2023-11-14-ryma-grindavik...

Your comment prompted me to look up how many Poles live in Iceland. Turns out they are the largest minority which is mildly surprising but shouldn’t be I guess.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_in_Iceland

When I started reading RÚV I wondered what the red and white flag was. My mind tried with “Greenland”, but Greenland because of the Nordic affiliation, but Greenland itself has a population of less than 60k, so how many greenlanders could there be in Iceland?

When the flag turned out to be Polish I had to turn to the Woodchuck Book and was surprised, just like you. I should have mentioned it. Thanks for the link.

I was recently in Iceland with some Polish-Canadian friends and they were amused by the number of Polish people we encountered.

@dang - might we change the title to "Spreading & Subsidence Damage in Grindavík"?

With all the "Lava & Eruption!" hype around this situation, that would make what is actually happening now in Grindavík much clearer.

> With all the "Lava & Eruption!" hype around this situation, that would make what is actually happening now in Grindavík much clearer.

Is it really the right place for it, though? HN is not CNN; if you want that sort of news there are probably better sources.

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

True...but this is currently the #1 story on HN, so evidently "good hackers" find it interesting.

And if the current situation is "nothing special happening", then let's not waste any good hacker's time with a pretty-ambiguous headline.

They've also mostly rescued all animals as well from the area, including animals in homes, along with sheep and horses in pastures.

When the volcano blows, it should only be property, building, and road damage.

> When the volcano blows, it should only be property, building, and road damage.

Mind you, those roads in Iceland might be expensive, with luxurious built-in heating. ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowmelt_system

I can tell you for sure there are no such heated roads in Grindavík. The one in Reykjavík is on a street that cars can drive down, but in practice don't very often. Large plows would struggle there and the pushed off snow would clog the walking areas in a very popular tourism location.

There's a non-zero risk of it going off in the ocean, which could cause ash fallout, depending on the magnitude of the blast.

Property and infrastructure damage is not the only outcome here. We could end up with ash fallout and flight disruptions. There's also a major power station in the immediate risk zone, which is a major loss if it gets destroyed.

If and when this blows up, it's going to be big. The question is just if it's big and causes fallout, or just big. And when we're talking about property damage, it's less damage and more "will the town be obliterated or not". The magma is most shallow under the town, and there's a 15 kilometer magma pipe extending to the ocean. So the possibility of the eruption happening in Grindavik itself is also very real.

2010 showed what kinds of impacts can occur when a volcano erupts in Iceland. [1]

> In response to concerns that volcanic ash ejected during the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland would damage aircraft engines, the controlled airspace of many European countries was closed to instrument flight rules traffic, resulting in what at the time was the largest air-traffic shut-down since World War II.

> On 16 April 2010, 16,000 of Europe's usual 28,000 daily scheduled passenger flights were cancelled and on the following day 16,000 of the usual 22,000 flights were cancelled. By 21 April 95,000 flights had been cancelled.

> IATA stated that the total loss for the airline industry was around US$1.7 billion (£1.1 billion, €1.3 billion).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_travel_disruption_after_th...

Eyjafjallajökull was a special case, it was not an oceanic blast, but a blast under a glacier. Fjallajökull means "glacier mountain". The blast flash-melted several tones of ice, which caused the lava to cool rapidly forming the ash cloud. If my memory serves, the glacier was in the caldera itself.

But the effect would be very similar. The water would vaporize and create an aerosol of ash.

> When the volcano blows, it should only be property, building, and road damage.

People had the option to get their animals, but not everyone did so. If the eruption destroys the town some animals will be among the casualties, if they haven't starved etc. already.

For anyone guessing how it could go to the town, just check the recent case of the La Palma volcano lava that runned over a town.

https://youtu.be/kjg-1BemSOo?si=H_We-hOXtCHT3Wgc

The eruption in Hawai some years ago also destroyed a town and a harbor.

What I find eerie is that they stroke out Grindavik from the signs: https://twitter.com/grindaviknews/status/1724286780914962487

I know, they are doing it to inform people that they shouldn't go there but it gives it such a post apocalyptic vibe.

Well, to be honest, for Grindavik we could currently be talking about a Pre-Apocalyptic situation :)

I wonder if this is a fiction genre. Can I read a book that starts with a happy town with not much going on, builds up to just before a catastrophe, and then ends? Maybe like Part 1 of Seveneves.

I read this book recently: https://www.amazon.com/Anomaly-Novel-Herv%C3%A9-Tellier/dp/1... - don't want to give away too much (that's why I'm not linking to the Wikipedia article), but it fits the genre you are proposing - except spanning the entire world, not just a town.

Maybe you can find something on this list, https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/pre-apocalyptic

I looked at a few books on this list, but not every book seems to really be about pre-apocalypse. Pre-Apocalyptic fictions sounds like literary edging :D

“The Doomsday Book” by Connie Willis kind of has that feeling for a while. I couldn’t really get into it, though; it’s undeniably a well-written book, just not the kind of book I wanted to read.

That was my hope for Fear the Walking Dead, a show about society collapses under a zombie apocalypse. Instead we got some hints in a pre-zombie LA, went straight to a cordoned of quarantine zone and a time jump to "now the world, except your little suburb, went to hell". Seems writing convincing stories about why everything would collapse is a lot harder than stories set after an assumed collapse.

Sounds like the movies "Don't look up" and "Melancholia"

Not much really happens, all everybody knows is that doom is imminent. The movies are mainly about how the different characters handle this situation.

That said, I am still waiting for a movie that just suddenly ends with a car crash where the main protagonist dies, fully unrelated to the story.

The last episode of Downton Abbey, Season 3 is reasonably close to that.

A bit reminiscent of the ending of No Country for Old Men, although you never find out if he actually dies.

On The Beach. So much doom I literally can’t finish it. Ok it’s post-apocalyptic but reads like it’s pre-apocalyptic.

It's the standard practice when the road is closed. It doesn't give apocalyptical vibes to me, but maybe roads break too often where I live :)

It is the usual way of denoting that there is no turn right which leads to the designated location. Usually because of some road closure. Of course here it has a strange vibe to it.

Yeah, standard procedure (here in Germany too), except usually it's the road that's closed, and not the entire town...

This is an American interpretation. Here in the US, cones, lights, or lane-blockers are used to close exits.

Culturally, its because American's won't read a sign and follow the instructions if we can still "do" it. You have to physically block us, and its too expensive to change all the signs.

My favorite is Chicago's reversible express lanes, which have thirteen physical gates you have to blow through in order go to the wrong way. I always wonder if they add another set every time someone still drives through them all.

Nah, it's actually the same here in Germany too - I live near a railway crossing which was recently rebuilt and couldn't be used for a few weeks. The "strike-through" at the intersection was just the first step, then there was a first barrier blocking half the street, with a sign "residents only", and then a bit later a second barrier, but still some people just absolutely had to drive past all those barriers until they were literally in the middle of the construction site to find out that no, it's really not possible to cross the tracks...

They aren’t closing the exit though as it’s needed so people can get down there for quite a few reasons. There are actual manned roadblocks a bit further in.

Not that it's quite the same, but I wonder how common it is to have a place struck off of official maps and signs for safety purposes? I know of one, Wittenoom[0] in Australia, which was removed due to being heavily contaminated with asbestos, but I wonder what other examples are out there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenoom,_Western_Australia

There was a lake that was removed from the maps of a state park near me, although that was to prevent it from being over-visited

Just FYI, the past tense of "strike" is "struck", not "stroke". It could be argued that it should be "stroke" to parallel words like "break-broke" and "wake-woke" but it's not. English is weird. (And the past tense of "hike" is "hiked", not "huck" nor "hoke", which aren't words at all [UPDATE - turns out they are, see child comment from u/GrinningFool], but they probably should be.)

Or they meant this def'n of stroke:

> a mark made by drawing a pen, pencil, or paintbrush in one direction across paper or canvas.

Yes, but that's a noun, not a verb.

The word "stroke" can be a verb, but its meaning (to rub lightly) doesn't make any sense in context.

Well, IIRC I just tapped whatever autocomplete suggested :)

huck - to throw or toss; to launch oneself in the air

hoke - to give a contrived, falsely impressive, or hokey quality to

Well, whadyaknow. TIL.

Me too, for 'hoke'. For 'huck' I first encountered it watching Tucker and Dale, as in "he just hucked himself in the wood chipper!"

Even more confusingly, if it is past participle usage, it's "stricken"

e.g. "Strike it off", "I struck it off", "It was stricken off"

same with drive/drove/driven

One of those fun things for ESL folks I am sure.

“Struck” is the general past participle of “strike", “stricken” is a past participle available specifically for the sense of removing from a list (but the general form “struck” is also correct and often used for that sense, too.)

It's not that narrow - e.g. "was stricken by a sense of foreboding"

You also would say panic-stricken, not panic-struck.

Agree it's not universal though, helpfully, and sometimes is it "struck" in non adjectival past participle.

But not in the OP case, I think (much like striking off a list, striking off a sign). I probably should have mentioned that it wasn't universal for struck though.

I could just have confused things.

Apocalyptic vibe would be signs overrun with weeds and such and cars stranded on highways

Iceland is the only place I've been to twice in two years when traveling.

I usually go a new place everytime but I simply couldn't get enough of it just once and had to go again ASAP.

Hopefully this situation turns out better than the worse predictions.

Same. Wife and I went for New Years this year and it was by far one of the most satisfying vacations I've ever taken. Absolutely nothing about the place is overrated, and we lament how little of it we've experienced.

It is as close to magic as anywhere I've been, and their New Year celebration is insanity.

I went up to the hill in the center of Reykjavik for New Years and was astonished, completely astonished by the amount of fireworks that could be seen.

We have plans to visit for this coming New Years, (unless things get dramatically worse I suppose). Excited in reading your comment.

If you can, see if you can get to a bonfire a few hours beforehand. Travel / tourism agencies can arrange this.

Also, if you'd enjoy seeing the Aurora Borealis, know that due to weather, clouds, etc., it isn't very reliable, and it may be best to plan on multiple attempts at it. The experiences we had ranged from disappointing to terrifically amazing, but if we'd only gone the one time, we'd have left without having experienced it.

Been there three times in winter, never saw an aurora brealis once... Still great trips so!

The hotdogs are very overrated! Hospital in Selfoss is amazing though, especially after eating one :)

I thought how can a hotdog be better.. its a hotdog.

They blew my mind, best hot dog i've ever had. Even ordered some directly from Iceland after coming back with all the toppings.

I think I ate three over two weeks and they were all awful. The only thing that was really nice there was pepper cheese.

Honestly. It’s a beautiful country full of wonderful people and I can’t wait to go back again. Wish them nothing but the best!

We visited in January 2017 and I'd love to go back when there's more than 5 hours of daylight. The trip was spectacular. And it's an easy flight from DC and 5 nights was plenty to hit most of the easy tourist spots.

Winter is the ideal time to go northern lights hunting. Either way, I've been propably too often, 5 times by now, twice in summer including one highland crossing, and three times in winter. My recomondation would be, if budget and vacation time allows, to visit Iceland once in summer and once in winter.

What's interesting to see in the pictures is that they already built a detour around the fissure: it starts in the area of fresh asphalt to the right of the guy in this photo https://cdn.mbl.is/frimg/1/45/18/1451863.jpg, then goes through an also freshly paved-over parking lot/former green space and rejoins the road in the background (behind the construction fences).

I think you are misinterpreting this photo. Nobody has been paving over the fissures in the town. I think it's a combination of moisture, different coloured asphalt sections, and light/shadows that tricks the eye. As you can see in this drone footage [1] the car park asphalt is darker, and the hot water pipes ruptured in the ground create steam that spreads moisture over the asphalt, making it darker. Also, you have a building next to the car park which makes it even darker than the street.

[1] https://ruv-vod-clips.akamaized.net/76a26e8d-1190-492c-9163-...

To be fair, they never said the fresh looking asphalt was a result of paving over the fissure, just that it's there.

I hear in Japan the reason they have electric wires on poles and houses have individual gas cylinders is to provide resiliency during earthquakes -- the earth becomes a liquid.

Gases passing through dirt/sandy substances at high pressure will tend to do that.

See for example: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EImO4agHqOg

Very interesting! Now I have to think how this could be used to make something productive! :D Maybe some sort of special bearing floating on the fludized sand you can turn of and stop/stabilize by turning thr gas pipe off ?

Electric wires on poles are also more likely to get damaged by wind, ice, fire, and flood, either directly or by trees falling onto them. There are tradeoffs involved.

They're also much cheaper to construct.

Getting OT but I've noticed in Scandinavian countries they use pavers a lot where in the USA we'd more likely have poured concrete or asphalt/tarmac. Sidewalks, parking surfaces, driveways, etc.

Pavers would seem to me to be both more expensive to install and require higher maintenance. Is there a reason they are used so much?

For the uk readers: I'm guessing 'pavers' are 'flags', or 'flagstones'.

Humped a few of them in my time...thank goodness for Atari, and all that followed.!!

They're called pavers, or block paving, or monoblock in the UK. Flagstones are big slabs of stone.

There are machines that are super fast at laying them. And digging them up and replacing them is a lot less disruptive than asphalt. Plus it makes cars drive a bit slower. And they drain naturally

Purely a guess on my part: concrete or asphalt will be destroyed by frost heave[1] and be difficult to patch well, while pavers will endure it better and are easier to restore.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_heaving

We have electric wires on poles in the northeast US, too—largely because the ground freezes solid for several months of the year.

It's not that unusual a precaution.

(Though yes, as a sibling commenter notes, we do have to deal with them getting taken down by wind, lightning, and the occasional hapless driver from time to time. There's no perfect solution.)

My guess is that it's more likely due to the cost of digging/right of way, etc. It gets significantly cold here in MN and most powerlines are underground, but we have a lot of open space.

A statistic I remember from when I lived there is that Connecticut has more trees per mile of powerline than any other state. Every time there was an ice storm, thousands of people lost power.

In Sweden power lines are buried, even in the very north of the country. I guess it's a cost thing.

That very much depends on which part of Sweden you're talking about. Around most cities they are buried but in the countryside 'luftledning' - literally 'air cable', denoting cabled hung on impregnated wooden poles - is still more the norm than the exception. Where I live (about 60 km north of Göteborg) Vattenfall has been talking about burying those cables for decades but they're still there and regularly are taken down by trees, errant drivers and similar mishaps.

Iceland has had active volcanoes all the time it has been inhabited.

Does anyone know what the "traditional" response to these sorts of ground movements was?

Historically?

The 1783 Laki eruption comes to my mind. Back then, a 25km long fissure with 130 vents opened. About 14km3 of lava and 1km3 of tephra was emitted. Lava fountains were estimated to have reached between 800m and 1400m.

Some 20-25% of the population died, 50% of cattle and 50% of the horse population perished.

It is argued that this eruption was the catalyst for the French Revolution, as the amount of emitted gasses caused extreme weather patterns across Europe (and the world) throughout the 1780s leading to famine, diseases and social unrest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki

In contemporary times, there's the 1973 eruption of Eldfell on the island of Heimaey. It destroyed some 400 homes and led to a temporary evacuation of some 5.300 inhabitants. By 1975, some 80% of the population had returned. Moreover, today it's the foremost fishing center of Island with over 1/3rd of the total fish catch originating from its harbor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldfell

> By 1975, some 80% of the population had returned.

Of course they had to come back to “home island”.

>The parish minister and provost of Vestur-Skaftafellssýsla, Jón Steingrímsson (1728–1791), grew famous for the eldmessa [ˈɛltˌmɛsːa] ("fire mass") that he delivered on 20 July 1783.

I looked this up, and found this: "In his introduction to the translation Guðmundur E. Sigvaldson classifies Jón’s Eldritið as a “scientific classic as well is a literary jewel.” [0]

It chronicles the aftermath of the eruption in some detail (i.e. people did not flee the region, for some reason....), e.g.:

>The poisonous compounds leaked out of the Laki craters caused, as Jón depicts so graphically, the skin to rot off the spines of horses, swelling in their heads, jaws, and joints, rotting insides, and shrinking bones. The sheep and cattle suffered similarly. The meat from these animals was “both foul-smelling and bitter and full of poison, so that many a person died as a result of eating it” (Fires of the Earth, 76).

[0] https://www.medievalist.com/articles/strongjn-versus-the-vol...

"Does anyone know what the "traditional" response to these sorts of ground movements was?"

The very old tradition was to increase the amounts of sacrifices to the gods, because clearly they were angry.

Is there documentation for this? Icelanders are Christian (since when, I'm not sure), and would more likely pray. Also I don't think there is a history of human sacrifice in Norway/Denmark/Scandinavia.

With the very old tradition I meant the pre christian times (which is why I wrote "the gods").

And I was not necessarily talking about human sacrifice, even though it seems very likely, that this happened as well.

https://scandinaviafacts.com/did-the-vikings-perform-human-s...

Nothing specific to earthquakes and volcanoes or other bad omens, but there was probably some human sacrifice.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blót

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ättestupa

This article talks about the Eldfell eruption in 1973. It's one of the few cases where people were able to divert a lava flow.

https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/news/volcano-watch-wh...

IIRC, they also used the remaining solid lava flow for district heating for a while so that it cooled down faster and could be trucked out of the way where necessary.

Does anyone know how the large datacenters in Iceland are faring?

I know that most of the big ones are north east (near the international airport in Keflavík).

They were really popular for crypto miners, but have been moving into HPC very rapidly. I’d assume there is a ton of extremely expensive equipment less than 10-15 miles from where all this activity is.

Have they evacuated the town?

Edit: I see that it looks like they have but residents will be allowed in to retrieve belongings. Is there any chance that an eruption comes in the form of a large scale collapse above the magma chamber…or is that not plausible?

While anything's possible, the trend of recent eruptions in the Reykjanes peninsula have been more of the slow trickling small kind. They have also been relatively off the beaten path, so it's hard to compare ground shifting in the previous places since you likely wouldn't notice it after the fact like you will with pavement and buildings.

Got it. Here’s hoping that this will be a continuation of the trend.

It only needs a small scale collapse if your house is standing over the sinkhole while you're inside, so evacuation is probably still the safest bet...

Oh yeah, I wasn’t meaning to suggest that evacuation might not be the correct course, it seems at this point not doing so would be irresponsible. Was just curious about the possibility of something very large occurring given the sinking above the chamber.

Also some volcanic gases that might be released are quite poisonous & can be blown by wind around the place.

Any public data on this? I would love to collab on some predictive modeling for cases like this. There are some sources but couldn't find anything comprehensive enough to be accurate, need more historical context comparisons etc.

Icelandic Met Office probably.

https://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes

I haven't explored the site enough to see if they have downloadable datasets, however.

Here is at least some interpretation of data with interesting graphs, like displacement graphs etc: https://en.vedur.is/about-imo/news/a-seismic-swarm-started-n...

Somebody observed in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38233905 seeing the town shake on camera

Seems more likely to be the wind blowing the camera - hard to tell

Most likely wind. However this thread was from Friday and the ground was constantly shaking that day. I was there and there were rather large earthquakes like every 10-20 minutes (and smaller earthquakes every 20-30 seconds) between 16:00 and 23:00 (when I evacuated). It is highly likely that the poster in this thread was actually seeing earthquakes.

Live webcam https://youtube.com/live/Qvw5qh5K4wI

1m displacement is crazy, I can't imagine how much destruction it would cause inside a major city.

Aren't earthquakes super common in Iceland? Or am I wrong on that?

Earthquakes aren't uncommon, but what's happening in Grindavik is more than a earthquake. They were having hundreds of quakes an hour, a fissure opened and magma might come up soon. All in a little town and near a geothermal power plant which also fuels the Blue Lagoon. This also isn't super far from the main airport and the road that leads to it.

You aren't wrong, but the topic of interest here is the volcanic eruption. They are also relatively common compared to elsewhere in the world, but most are small and not in populated areas. See: https://www.visiticeland.com/eruption/

They are and they tend to be small because of the type of plate boundary they’re associated with. But when they’re coming in large swarms near a volcano which is the case here, it’s a pretty strong signal of an impending eruption.

During Covid a new volcano erupted quite near Grindavik, that was very tourist friendly: close to Reykjavik, not too large or dangerous, nothing it could damage nearby, a few km hiking from a road. Many web cams were setup and lots of beautiful drone footage was uploaded to YouTube as well. It erupted again 2021 and 2022. So it's a well known volcano now to the Internet public.

Now it seems there will be an eruption on the same fissure again, but a) there are many more earthquakes than before, b) the detected movement of magma is far larger, and c) it could erupt anywhere on a 15km fissure line, but right now it seems to do so right in the middle of the nearby town. So it looks like this time it will be a disaster.

There is also a geothermal power plant that heats the whole peninsula nearby, as well as tourist attraction the Blue Lagoon, that are both at risk.

yes, and earthquakes are also super common precursors to volcanic eruptions

Looking for Grindavik news on X etc right now, there is already an annoying amount of video and images of erupting volcanoes, from previous years, or from somewhere else completely. Even though there is no eruption at all yet. Annoying.

Community notes need to speed up

Am I using a different Twitter? I only see local videos no "annoying amount of video and images of erupting volcanoes, from previous years, or from somewhere else completely"

I was seeing a lot of what Scarblac said they were seeing, but looking right now at

https://twitter.com/search?q=grindavik&f=live

and it's pretty clean. You'll occasionally see the famous drone video from the 2021 eruption being touted as what's happening in Gridavik right now.

Yesterday it was way worse. Then the cracks in the middle of town opened and it seems that's sensational enough to use instead.

Not just Twitter, I saw a "symbol" picture of a volcanic eruption on a major German news site about Grindavik...

This is why you can't use X (or facebook or any other social media) for news.

All depends on the accounts that you follow but I agree that the search function of X is horrible.

The TL;DR of how you can search on X:

• from:twittername

• keyword1 OR keyword2

• min_faves:2000

• min_retweets:2000

• filter:links

• filter:images

• until:YYYY-MM-DD

• since:YYYY-MM-DD

• near:location within:15mi

its actually a pretty nice search ngl

makes you wonder about this very thread then

HN has plenty of flaws and cultural issues, but the stated intention here is to promote discussion, not "user engagement". Where Twitter/X promotes outright lies, here I typically take more issue with folks' lenses and biases. tl;dr: I trust HN orders of magnitude more than Twitter and crew.

Is Ycombinator paying out to their "content generators" here?

Also, while I can imagine one's HN reputation helping someone a job or find a venture partner in this little bubble, there is no comparison with Xitter's reach.

Reminds me of nearly every time there is an aircraft incident with, say a 737 but the media show a stock photo of a completely different plane that has 4 engines.

You may want to consider waiting a few more minutes to get news from reliable sources.

You can watch the live cams on RÚV.is or the tv channel ruv2 that streams from there. That way you also get RÚV radio sound, with their great music choices that now clash with the night images…

Instead of becoming a more reliable source of news, thanks to ad payouts and the resulting engagement farming by blue checkmarks Twitter/X is becoming increasingly less reliable.

Since the effect is so obvious, it’s hard to imagine that hasn’t been the objective.

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