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Comment Re:The world we live in. (Score 1) 595

The victim is never at fault.
That being said, there's an important question to ask.

Why is is that the other women present that night were not attacked?

Is it because they traveled in pairs? Is it because they never left their drinks unattended?

It's often something like the person or one of their friends realizes that the world crashing down on them, so they get the fuck out of there ASAP and wake up the next morning having no idea how they got home.

Yeah, about that. That's a symptom of acute alcohol intoxication too. As far as I know, I have never been date raped but in my younger days, there were many nights that I don't remember how I got home.

LK

Comment Re:OMG (Score 4, Interesting) 29

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.

Comment Re:is DHS aware of this? (Score 3, Funny) 29

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.

Comment Re:OMG (Score 4, Informative) 29

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 ;)

Comment Re:OMG (Score 3, Insightful) 29

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.

Comment Re:Metalocalypse (Score 1) 38

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...

Comment Re:We're heading in the right direction (Score 1) 38

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.

Comment Re:We're heading in the right direction (Score 3, Informative) 38

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.)

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