I love volcanic eruptions. This feels like a dangerous thing to say, because one of the likeliest doomsday scenarios doomsday experts throw out is that of a real bad volcanic eruption, but hey: The earth giveth; the earth taketh away. Also, if I can jinx the entire planet with a blog post? That’s probably good news. Maybe I can jinx it back, and then jinx some other stuff. Like Vladimir Putin and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Anyway, volcanic eruptions: Sweet! So cool. When I was a kid, I had an imaginary baseball team, and one of the players was named Compso Mannino Central Vent Volcano. Compso was a Compsognathus, of course, a small biped of a dinosaur not unlike a chicken crossed with a roadrunner. Mannino came from the last name of a kid on my brother’s Little League team who I think hit bombs. Central Vent and Volcano? Obviously, I was a Montessori kid, and I spent a lot of time at the station that had the little book on all the parts of a volcano. I’m not sure if this is before or after my family visited Mount Saint Helens and I was terrified, but a word of advice to park rangers being asked about eruption risks by Montessori-educated four-year-olds: Don’t tell them you’d know because earthquakes would come first. That will just make them uneasy about earthquakes.
There’s liquid rock coming out of the earth right now in Iceland, and some of the plumes of it are still shooting 100 feet in the air. This, we’re told, is not that high. It was shooting 300 feet in the air yesterday. Volcanos are awesome. This volcano is right next to the Blue Lagoon, which you may have seen on Instagram from your 20-something friend who let you in on the secret that flights to Iceland aren’t as expensive as flights to the rest of Europe. You probably knew this secret already by the time your friend’s face showed up on your phone at the Blue Lagoon. You probably heard this secret about three years before your friend finally made it to Iceland. You probably saw pictures of a wildcard you knew from high school—the kind of kid who ends up hiking the PCT—at the Blue Lagoon four years before your friend went, right before said wildcard moved from Flagstaff to Butte because Flagstaff was getting a little too overrun.
The volcano is also right next to the town of Grindavík, population 0 right now but near 3,000 before the earthquakes started—the earthquakes which, as rangers at Mount Saint Helens can tell you—precede volcanic eruptions. (To be clear: The people didn’t die. They left.) Fun fact about Grindavík: It was the subject of slave rides by African pirates in 1627. I bet you could start a very productive conversation by bringing this fact up the next time you’re in the presence of two modern Americans with strong political differences.
Liquid rock, though. It has to be so hot to melt rock. We talked about things adjacent to this yesterday, but we didn’t really talk about the heat necessary to melt rock. Way hotter than what it takes to melt faces. Tenacious D, step up your game.
Practical matters: This is a bad spot for a volcanic eruption if you’re Iceland. Very close to Reykjavík. Doesn’t sound like lava flows are risking reaching Reykjavík or anything, but I think that in general, if the earth is opening up and showing you the image of Hell, you don’t want that to be close to your nation’s capital.
The eruption itself, and the volcano: The mountain is named Fagradalsfjall, and its highest peak is Langhóll, which stands 1,263 feet above sea level. It isn’t blowing its top. I don’t know if it’s even the kind of volcano that can do that, or if there is a kind of volcano that can do that and a kind that can’t. I haven’t been in preschool in a long time. My volcanic knowledge is slipping. Fagradalsfjall has got a fissure opening up instead, and opening up in a big way. Here’s a livestream. I might just leave this on the TV for the rest of Christmas? It looks like there’s some snow cover around the fissure. Kind of Christmasy, right? Nature’s cozy fireplace.
