Meet Gosi.
(Credit: Veðurstofa Íslands)
While there have been many reports of dead birds around the eruption site, Gosi ("Jack" - also sounds like the word for "eruption") seems to be taking his new reality in stride. Most nights he comes out of the wilderness to the people working at the eruption site.
Is he a totem? A sign from nature? Does he come bearing some hidden knowledge? Or does it have something to do with the food they keep giving him? We may never know. But this we do know: our readers will get a nice shiny new video of molten rock bursting from the depths of the earth tonight. :)
Join us below the fold.
(Credit: MBL / Golli)
Another day, another symptom or two which I don't know whether to credit to the pollution. Had a nasty headache all day today. On days that I'm lucky, the horizon is only blued out in my rear view mirror when I leave home. When I'm not lucky, it's through my windshield ahead of me. Perhaps I shouldn't be working outside when there's pollution, but my land isn't going to prepare itself for winter. My neighbors sheep aren't going to round themselves up either. At least the mist cleared out of Miðdalur in time for that.
It's nice having two meters across the fjörd from me. But given that they usually can't even agree on the levels and they're on the same side, and I'm at a couple hundred meters higher elevation across the fjörd, they're of limited utility. I've taken to just judging by how much my valley is blued out. There's been an awful lot of views like this recently:
(Credit: Páll Kjartansson)
The numbers on the meters in the region vary. Sometimes it's in the hundreds, up occasionally into the lower thousands of µg/m³. Sometimes it's just a couple dozen. Sometimes the whole region is blanketed, sometimes just patches. But it never goes away entirely. At least it's not been as bad in Reykjavík as it is further east in Þjórsárdálur:
When one gets symptoms, you can't personally say whether it's random or due to the pollution; you need statistical analysis to do that. And statistical analysis is finally starting to come in. For example, Reyðarfjörður has all together spent under two days over danger mark, with under a week in poor air quality levels. However, asthma medication consumption has increased 46% for the whole period since the eruption started.
The doctor involved in researching the health consequences of the eruption, Hanne Krange, says that it's difficult to know what will be the long-term health effects of the repeated exposure to the gases, that there has been a shortage of research, in particular for studies that have tracked patients for more than a few years post-exposure. She sees the current eruption as an excellent opportunity to learn more about the issue.
Guess we're all guinea pigs. ;) Time to take some more aspirin.
(Credit: NASA / MODIS)
It is day 42 since the eruption broke through Holuhraun.
Magnús Tumi Guðmundsson flew over the caldera and the eruption today. He said the eruption is still very powerful and there's no signs of weakening, or a reduction in subsidence in the caldera, which has now reached 35 meters total (about 10 stories). He thinks the eruption could easily go on for months.
As a concerning sign (sorry, no pictures!), he also reported the presence of many small ice cauldrons along the rim of the caldera, which suggest melting from geothermal heat coming up around the subsiding plug.
Let me go out on a limb here and say that this is not a good thing.
Some people are trying to use the subsidence to make predictions. Haraldur Sigurðsson did a regression fit to the subsidence curve and found that if the subsidence pattern continues as it's going, then the eruption will end in March of 2015. Of course, I'm reminded of the XKCD comic:
If one had tried to predict what was going to happen in Bárðarbunga several months ago based on past behavior, their answer would have been "sitting there peacefully". So much can change in a year's time that I think such a simplistic analysis is of little utility. Haraldur seems to agree somewhat, saying that "This is the simplest perspective on the event and not necessarily the most correct, but we have to begin somewhere."
Okay, that's all for today! Join us again... wait, what's that? A video you say? No, no, I was just lying about that to get you to read. Ha ha ha... wait a minute, what is that pitchfork-like sound I'm hearing? Hey, those torches aren't helping the air quality any! Okay, okay, fine, here you go - this one courtesy of Gísli Gíslason. :)
Update, 2:15: From my Facebook feed, as an example of the sort of thing I've been seeing a lot (translating and removing names):
FC: Do I have a sore throat because of the volcano or am I getting sick?
GA: Yes
KJ: EIther of those call for cogniac.
KK: Because of the volcano.
KA: I woke up this morning with my throat killing me.
FC: Are you sick or is it the volcano?
JH: http://www.vedur.is/...
FC: Were you watching this? https://www.youtube.com/...
EV: I was indeed thinking about that this morning. I think it's definitely the volcano. If not ebola ;)
KA: I'm not sick. It's probably the volcano.
AV: I made the mistake this morning of taking a rather long jog after the bus (didn't catch it) - I've been feeling like an astmha sufferer all day! Damn eruption.
EHV: I don't have a sore throat. There's no eruption in America. You have a sore throat because there's an eruption.
VE: Either that or just old and grumpy.
EV: I ended up in the same situation last weekend, AV! Rather caught the bus. Throat's been bugging me since.
Update, 20:20: No update this evening, sorry!
Update, 21:00: Or this evening either. I'll catch you all up tomorrow. :)