[Rockhounds] Inside Scientists’ Life-Saving Prediction of the Iceland Eruption

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

On November 10, 2023, Kristín Jónsdóttir
<https://en.vedur.is/about-imo/employees/persona/214/fyrirtaeki/2>, head of
the Icelandic Meteorological Office’s department of volcano research, was
having a rare day off. “It was my 50th birthday,” she said. Then everything
began to shake. She would spend the day staring at her phone, watching the
earthquakes bloom across maps of Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula.

The peninsula experiences fissure eruptions, where the ground splits open
and lava pours out. Since late October, attention had been focused on the
peninsula’s Svartsengi region — home to the popular Blue Lagoon spa, a
geothermal power plant, and the coastal town of Grindavík. The peninsula’s
last three fissure eruptions had flooded isolated valleys with fire. Now,
though, the town was under threat.

The maelstrom of temblors on November 10 revealed that a buried magmatic
river had snaked its way toward Grindavík and its 3,600 inhabitants. More
distressingly, a dike — a vertical magma body akin to a curtain of liquid
fire — had fountained up from that subterranean river, stopping just shy of
the surface.

Quickly, the authorities evacuated the town. And then everyone waited.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-scientists-life-saving-prediction-of-the-iceland-eruption-20240220/