From Bloomberg's CityLab:
Living among volcanoes is nothing new in the island nation. But as a new eruptive era begins, the Reykjavik region is honing defenses and rethinking development.
When Kjartan Fridrik Adolfsson and his family fled their home in Grindavik, Iceland, in November 2023, they didn’t know their evacuation would become permanent. For weeks the small fishing town of 3,800 people had been rocked by intensifying earthquakes, and authorities feared a devastating volcanic eruption could be imminent. “We left with nothing but the clothes on our backs,” the 60-year-old accountant says.
Weeks later, fountains of molten rock burst out at the town’s doorstep — part of a series of 11 eruptions that have hit the area since March 2021, with the most recent activity on April 1. The seismic shifts have torn fissures in the landscape, cracked roadways and damaged buildings, while lava flows have destroyed a handful of houses. Today, few residents remain in Grindavik, which is just 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Iceland’s capital and largest city, Reykjavik.
Events like this aren’t new in Iceland, a famously geologically active island nation that’s home to more than 30 volcanic areas and hundreds of hot springs and geysers. Adolfsson himself moved to Grindavik as a child after his family fled a 1973 eruption on Iceland’s Westman Islands. But the country’s southwest corner is entering a new eruptive phase that experts say will last for centuries.
Faced with the likelihood of future displacement and disruption from volcanic activity, Iceland has been creating new tools to protect residents and infrastructure. These include building barriers to protect against lava, studies to better predict where it might flow next, and new methods to cool and constrain the molten rock. Thinking ahead, planners are reconsidering development patterns in the Reykjavik region, so the nation’s capital can take new volcanic activity into account when it thinks about growth.
Build the Walls
Geologically, Iceland is turning a corner. “The eruptive phase we have just entered will last about 300 to 400 years,” says Thor Thordarson, a professor of volcanology at the University of Iceland. “We will be living with this threat long term.”Iceland sits on a seismic hot spot, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are slowly drifting apart. On average, an eruption has struck every three years since the beginning of the 20th century. Much of this activity has taken place in Iceland’s remote interior, which is largely uninhabited. But the most recent seismic activity has been clustered on the Reykjanes Peninsula, which extends westwards from Greater Reykjavik and contains both the country’s main airport and its most popular tourist attraction, the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa....
....MUCH MORE
Last July we posted "Volcanic eruptions on Iceland might last decades" but sadly the BBC no longer has an Icelandic pronunciation guide.
I suppose it's time to break out the BBC's Guide to Icelandic Pronunciation.
For example, during 2010's eruption we learned that Eyjafjallajokull is pronounced:
Ewe-gotta-be-fcking-out-'o-yer-skull
(pic via Patrick Nielsen's website)
Also that people will make jokes about anything:
"It was the last wish of the Icelandic economy that its ashes be spread over Europe"
Joking aside, just as long as we don't get another Laki - 1783:
Laki: How A Volcano Swallowed Europe
From the things I did not know file, Icelandic has dialects:
Icelandic Pronunciation Dictionary for Language Technology
The Icelandic Pronunciation Dictionary contains manually revised transcriptions in four pronunciation variants of Icelandic: the standard pronunciation, the northern post-aspiration variant ("harðmæli"), the north-eastern variant post-aspiration + voiced pronunciation, and the southern hv-variant. For descriptions of Icelandic pronunciation variants, see the respective documents `IPA_Pronunciation.pdf` or `SAMPA_Pronunciation.pdf` (the documents have identical content but the former describes the matter using the IPA phonetic alphabet and the latter uses the SAMPA phonetic alphabet).
And although Icelandic doesn't really have umlauts the language does sport an O capped with a diaeresis: Ö, or ö.
Watch out for that volcano.
