Does it have something to do with this, perhaps? ;)

She doesn't need to. The dike has now extended out beyond the glacier and is 60% of the way to Askja.

The real problem isn't the subglacial volcanoes, though. It's Hekla. They've been talking about this in the Icelandic press a bit, basically she usually gives an average of a couple dozen minutes advance warning, and then the ash plume reaches flight level in 5-20 minutes. Yet a dozen or so commercial passenger jets fly over her every day. There's one volcanologist recommending a permanent air traffic closure over her. The current situation really looks to be just asking or a serious tragedy at some point in the coming decades.

Foreigners? It's our volcano. You're the foreigners.

FYI, it was our volcanologists who called the Met Office on their bad claim. Of course, they had every reason to think that there was an eruption, the earthquake and tremor activity has gotten so crazy it's higher than that seen during all but the most powerful eruptions in the area, and it's not even broken out of the ground yet. The amount of magma in motion there is just bonkers.

The best scenario at this point is a Krafla-style eruption - lava fountains slowly releasing the pressure over a decade, a nice "tourist eruption". The worst realistic scenario is a long-lasting, multiple vent fissure eruption stretching between Bárðarbunga and Askja, which would likely be one of our "Oh My God, Oh My God, We're All Going To Die!" eruptions that happen every 100-200 years on average.

Yeah, it's morbidly fascinating to keep up with what's going on underground there. Whenever you run out of superlatives for how extreme the situation underground is, whatever crazy thing you were looking at before increases by half an order of magnitude ;) I thought it was crazy when they said the magma flow was 60 million cubic meters in 5 days. Now the estimate is 270 million cubic meters in 7 days. That's the flow rate of the freaking Hudson River at NYC, plowing straight through rock. And the seismometer readings are just freaking nuts, an earthquake every minute. And now it's on its way to connecting Bárðarbunga with Askja, it's over halfway there. Two of Iceland's most devastating volcanoes. If Michael Bay was writing it, all that'd be left for him to do would be to have an intrusion also go in the other direction to link up with Katla through Veiðivötn and Laki, with a simultaneous Hekla eruption ;)

Iceland's volcanoes have indeed done that quite a few times. Eruptions connected with Laki in particular have been nasty, the 970 eruption was reported to have frozen the Tigris and Euphrates in central Iraq, and the 1783-1784 eruption froze the Mississippi at New Orleans and there was ice seen floating in the Gulf of Mexico. Which is even more impressive when you realize that the closer a volcano is to the poles, the harder it is to alter climate suchly; Iceland's volcanoes give off abnormally high levels of SO2 (also, really unfortunately from a local perspective, HF). Laki's 1783-1784 eruption, for example, gave off a whopping 120 million tonnes of SO2 and 6 million of HF, 6 times more SO2 and orders of magnitude more HF than Pinatubo, the largest eruption of the 20th century.

The problem with that, however, is that these effects are only short term. Meanwhile, volcanoes also give off CO2, which contributes to warming and last much longer. So they provide short-term cooling but long-term warming.

That's why corporations have subsidiaries and sister corporations. MS Ireland is not the same company as MS USA.

Most of it is not actually earned abroad, due to accounting practices. MS USA sold all of their IP to MS Ireland, and pays MS Ireland a fee for every copy of MS software sold in the USA. That fee is almost certainly for an amount nearly (or actually) equal to the sales price. As a result, they claim a write-off on every title sold that's just about equal to that title's sales price. As a result, MS USA says they earned nothing on those titles. It's all based on technicalities that are unavailable to real people. Only corporations are allowed to account for profits and losses in such a way as to reduce their tax bills to nothing.

You know, that really is the sort of thing people would do here ;) When Dethklok - sorry, Skálmöld ;) - took the stage at Menningarnótt this evening (with about a quarter of the country in attendance - who doesn't like metal? there's even been multiple Skálmöld Day“s at elementary schools where little kids come in their best metal gear and listen/ sing along to their music, and no, I'm not kidding ;) )... anyway, when they took the stage, the concert started off with a news update about the volcano. ;)

There is one music fest that I'm aware of that's held next to a volcano ("Extreme Chill - Undir Jökli), but that volcano is extinct (Snæfell).

Bárðarbunga is unfortunately rather remote. Oh, and there's the fact that the 10% of Iceland around it is now a prohibited zone...

You can't say with any confidence at all right now what kind of eruption it's going to be in the long term nor what its effects will be. It's pretty much standard for Icelandic volcanoes (excepting Hekla and a few others) to start off with small lava eruptions, and it's pretty much a requirement of a subglacial eruption to begin suchly. These are chains of interconnected volcanoes, to the point where it's even hard to define what's one volcano and what's the next (it's rifts of permanent weakness from the parting of the plates). They expand as they see fit. Eyjafjallajökull began with the Móði and Magni eruptions on Fimmvörðuháls, for example.

The size of the eruption doesn't necessarily correlate with the magnitude of the jökulhlaup. They're glacial outburst floods, they occur when the water - however much is there - finds a way out of the glacier. A fast melt certainly increases the odds of a strong outburst, but it's not a requirement.

At this point we don't even know for sure that the lava has even met the ice, some of the scientists here are disputing the met office's claim.

It means Bárður's Bulge“.

Eyjafjallajökull means "Glacier of the Mountains of the Islands" (Eyja = Of islands; fjalla = of mountains; jökull = glacier). ("The Islands" = Vestmannaeyjar, a small island chain close off Iceland's southern shore; Eyjafjall and his big sister Katla form a mountain range near Vestmannaeyjar.)

You probably only think you're pronouncing "Bardarbunga" (you mean Bárðarbunga") right. It's "BOWR-thar-BOON-ka". The R is an alveolar tap (unless you say it slowly), the th is voiced and further foward on the teeth, the N is devoiced, and the "g" (which I rendered as "k") is unvoiced but also unaspirated.

Really? You're citing Top Gear as a source of factual information? What's next, are you going to teach me about the occupancy of pineapples at the bottom of the sea because of something you saw on Spongebob?

I'm assuming that's not a 30 minute Tesla fast charge station, since that's only 50kW.

The two issues I have the most interest in are 1) whether they use some sort of battery buffer to balance loads on the grid connects (otherwise I think the utility company won't be very happy with the unpredictable megawatt drains ;) But maybe the utility company is handling balancing on their side), and 2) how cooling on the charger is handled. Just simple resistance calcs show that once you get to really high power chargers, you have to cool the wire to the car to keep its heating to an acceptable level at an acceptable cable mass, so I'm curious how they handle that. Personally I've felt that high power rapid chargers should provide coolant for the car itself as well via the charge port. Why should the car have to haul around such a major cooling system and coolant reservoir when the charger already has to have it and has to cool its cable all the way up to the car? However, I've never heard of anyone actually implementing such an approach.

Not to mention that they can be a loss leader. 250Wh/mi at a commercial power rate of $0.08/kWh is two cents per mile. So a 150 mile charge is $3. There are lots of businesses that would pay $3 to keep a potential customer there for half an hour, esp. if said potential customer will likely feel appreciate and that "he owes them". Charging can also be "free with purchase", and businesses can limit the charge rate if $3 for a half hour chage is too steep of a loss leader for them.

All this ignoring the green cred / pr advantage of offering said charging in the first place.