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My biggest question is, why haven’t they changed their turn name to Grimdark - I mean it’s right there - and will they do so now?
The road is lava
Sorry, but no compassion from me: shouldn’t have built the road right under a lava stream. Stupid decision, really.
I think we need more photos from the #Iceland.
It’s been raining more than average here… So yeah. Same difference?
Is this normal in Iceland? What’s the current situation there?
Edit: Found Details link
I follow a guy on YT (An American geology professor) who is pretty into this situation. One of his viewers is a superfan and lived in Grindavik, giving him on the ground updates.
This eruption is expected to be part of a periodic cycle of increased activity that could last hundreds of years.
In a recent-ish video, he said the Icelandic government was offering to buy the home of anyone who wanted to sell in Grindavik, and that his superfan’s house had been purchased by the government.
I think the long term plan is probably to abandon the town.It happens. Times past they’ve used buckets of seawater to save villages from encroaching lava. Icelanders are built different.
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This won’t be the most narrative experience of the event, but basically, the town was mostly destroyed, however they were able to use firefighting boats to selectively cool the lava, resulting in not just saving their harbor (the main economic driver for their island), but also improving it, by making it more protected from the ocean.
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Well back in the 1990s, Tommy Lee Jones and the LAFD used jersey barriers, fire trucks, and knocked a building over to stop a lava flow from demolishing the west side of Los Angeles, so I’d say we’re pretty impressive too.
Fun fact, in California where the action described takes place, they are officially called k-rails, not jersey barriers. Had to double check wiki to confirm CA predated NJ where I learned about Ontario Tall Wall, which was mentioned but described so…
People credit Tommy Lee Jones, but the true hero was the basketball that we rolled along the way
Icelandic people meeting god before time started.
God: y’all want to die in fire or ice?
Icelandic people: yes
Mother nature is scary AF
Do you dig it out or just go over top with new road it’s gotta be pretty effed up underneath all that, before chiseling through it and clearing it off, and where do you go with the slag if you do dig it out? Do you treat it like snow?
where do you go with the slag
You sell it as decorative lava rock.
They did that in Hawaii decades ago when Kīlauea covered Chain of Craters road and others.
Kīlauea said “Fuck that” and covered the roads again and again, along with entire neighborhoods. The Hawaiians just let it all go back to nature now. You can drive roughly 10 miles of Chain of Craters Road now, which is in Volcanoes National Park, until it ends very much like the road in this picture.
Speaking of Kīlauea, you might be interested in reading about Jacks Lava House which survived for years as the entire neighborhood around it was reclaimed by the volcano. It was eventually reclaimed by Kīlauea as well about a decade ago.
I was feeling really bad for the guy thinking he was now homeless, because there would’ve been no way to sell the home prior being in the location it was, until I read the last lines of him living at his second home while he figures out what to do. Oh gee, I don’t know. How about, live in your spare home? For fucks sake “figuring out what to do”. Collect any reimbursement and move on in your extra house as if nothing happened. Rich motherfucker. There are few enough houses available in Hawaii without someone taking up multiple. No wonder Hawaiians are sick of haoli.
My rants aside though neat links! Thanks for posting them!
My understanding is that the lava house became an attraction more than a personal home. Folks would hike in there to stay a few days, B&B style, to get married there, etc.
There are few enough houses available in Hawaii without someone taking up multiple.
And Mark Fuckerberg has purchased like half of one of the entire islands.
I’ve yet to hear anything about him that I liked. Soulless robot.
Looks like they would need to bulldoze it level and I assume add some fill dirt to even out the grade, I don’t know how many winters such a road would last though.
Breathe, son.
Bro that’s the new Iceland, anything underneath has been Pompeii’d
This is worse than Pompeii. The ancient Roman city wasn’t buried under lava, but under ash, rock and boulders. While that is still very deadly, it isn’t nearly as destructive as lava. That’s why we can still experience Pompeii architecture, art and culture. Excavating this road, covered in solidified lava, is extremely difficult and costly. Just go over it, once it’s cooled.
‘cool’ is relative - the have to water the roads they build over the top to stop them melting!
Missed opportunity. We could have messed with the future.
On that note of a million questions, the soil looks pretty soily; How long would it take that new lava rock to become as soily on top?
I looked it up and unsurprisingly there’s a whole Wikipedia page about this. Long story short, it takes decades for rock to become soily at all so likely a much longer time till it becomes as soily as what’s around it here.
till it
You can’t till it 'til much later.
Did I use the wrong word there? I always assumed till and until were synonyms
You’re good, it was just a funny
Till has been in use in English since the 9th century; the earliest sense of the word was the same as the preposition to. It has been used as a conjunction meaning “until” since the 12th century. Until has been in use as both a preposition and a conjunction for almost as long. Both of these words are acceptable; you may send a text to your misbehaving child stating either “U R grounded till 4ever” or “U R grounded until 4ever.”
… you will probably wish to avoid ’till, use ’tiladvisedly, and use both until and tillfreely. And if you use till in writing and someone tells you that you have made an error, simply take the extra L off the end of the word and poke them in the eye with it.
You’re right, they’re just making a joke, as till also refers to how farmers prepare soil for planting crops.
Soil formation, also known as pedogenesis
^ when you’re done ruining Twitter for the day.
No, it’s someone who loves feet.
Suddenly thinking about how the race to sustainably create more soil will probably be a theme for scientific research in the near future.
Desertification is scary!
Lava rock tends to be very porous and “crumbly” though right? I would think it turns to soil faster than most other types of rock.
In Iceland it’s pretty cold a lot of the year - not insanely, but colder than a lot of plants prefer. So the rock to soil conversion happens via moss.
While on tour there last year, our guide pointed out the ages of certain lava fields, and he noted that the existing lava fields around Grindavik were between 700 and 1300 years old. My photos from the area show that they’re about 60-70% rock, with moss covering the rest. I suspect if you scraped away the moss, you’ll find slightly crumbly rock underneath (But don’t do that - do not mess with the moss in iceland). I’m not sure how long it takes for the lava to be converted into soil, but I would guess it’s more on the scale of multiple thousands of years.
This page (up until the waterfall) has some good photos of a few lava fields and gives dates for the eruptions that created them. Meandering Wild - Lava and Moss
(The photos are at the bottom of each blurb, not the top - so Eldhraun is the one with the rounded rocks and moss at 350 years old, and not the black rocks, and Dimmuborgir, at 2300 years old, is the one with the treetops shown below the craggy rocks.)Another banger from our tour guide was that (according to him) the locals say if you get lost in an Icelandic forest, just stand up. Which is… sorta true. They only tree of real quantity there is birch, and the tallest birch I saw was about 16ish feet (5ish meters). They do not grow heavily, so they’re a bit comedic and stringy. Decades old stands of them sort of look like 1-2 year old stands planted in warmer climates - without any ground cover, of course, because while grass will grow, the usual complement of weeds, vines, and what-not does not.
Why not mess with the moss?
It grows so slowly that disturbing it undoes decades of growth, and since it takes hundreds of years to convert rock to soil, messing with the moss is well, first, just upsetting the natural beauty, but also robs future generations of the land for just a few moments of “huh, neat.” Our tour guide was pretty reverent when he talked about the role that moss plays.
Also they’ll fine you and maybe bar you from returning.
Thanks! I’m in the PNW and moss grows heckin fast over here. We have a constant battle against it in our driveway, and on our roof.
Just paint a yellow line and call it a day.
Tone-deaf bosses be like, “actually we have a return to office mandate… We’re gonna need a note from your doctor.”
We’re gonna need a note from your volcanologist.
“I don’t understand why turnover is so high. Ever since COVID people just don’t have any work ethic. The lockdowns really destroyed our economy in irreparable ways. Wait no, don’t quit.”
The “people don’t want to work anymore” rallying cry has always confused me. Who ever wanted to work in the first place?
That’s always been my response when manager and owner use that whole “nobody wants to work anymore,” thing because they can’t get people to take offers for six bucks a year.
Every single time I hear that, I say out loud, “Well I certainly don’t want to work. Who in their right mind does? That’s why we get paid to do it.”
McDonalds in NYS is $20 an hour and they struggle to fill the jobs. Just saying.
High pay means nothing when the cost of living is even higher. Making 20 bucks an hour sounds great until you have to pay 3000 bucks in rent each month.
Part of that is because those jobs are fucking horrible to do.
Nok, kids these days are just lazy. My first job was BK. It was fine. Not horrible at all.
Oh it’s the kids that are wrong, huh? Ok Skinner.
I’ve spoken with many, many people about their jobs and McDonalds is not that bad
Good for them. I’ve done it as well, and it was fucking horrible.
Did you speak with the best people? All the best people told you that? All of the “many, many” people. Hundreds of them!
Just ask the UK how that debt and public services are going.
You still come in to work tomorrow, right?
Yes sir! Will bring some lava with me 😂😂😂
Yeah grab yourself a couple buckets full and just blot out the rest with several stacks of gravel :D
You just need one water bucket.
Glunk. Tss, tss, tss, tss, tss.
You bought a diamond pickaxe too, right?
Finally got them potholes filled.
that’s iceland. they don’t have potholes, because none of their streets get very old, see exhibit A
gild fjarvera frá vinnu!
Someone explain to me why we need AI to come up with cool things for us to look at…
We haven’t created real life catgirls yet
Pff. Andrew Lloyd Weber did that back in 1981.
Good thing no one ever made a movie of that, am I right?
It doesn’t exist until they release the butthole cut
The Butthole Cut would also be a great band name.
Black metal Andrew Lloyd Weber cover band.
Their first album is Release the Butthole Cut.
Why don’t they just move the infrastructure away from the volcano? Are they stupid?
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You mean toward the other volcanoes?
To anyone acquantinced with Iceland: What kind of logistical issues does this actually provoke? What measures do you typically (or exceptionally) take to make sure that no location runs unsupplied for too long?
I’m not the kind of person you wanted a response from since I know absolutely nothing, but I would imagine being an island, boats play a big role in keeping supply lines running.
Basically everyone gets evacuated from the affected area and are staying with friends and family in Reykjavík. Grindavík is a very small town compared to the rest of the world. The government has offered to buy properties from the ones who cannot return, since the erruptions have been going for a few years in that area and there’s no sign of stopping.
To answer your question for the rescuers, researchers, and workers left in the area, once the eruption starts it’s quite easy to predict the flow. Luckily there are a few other roads without the risk of lava flow, mainly due to lava diverting barricades. In case of emergencies they use helicopters.
Other parts in eruption risk zones would be similar, since it’s just not worth it for people to stay in those areas and most people can stay with family. And repairs to the road are usually pretty quick when the eruption dies down.
But what if I sit outside my house with a garden hose as the lava comes for it?
That’s a decent strategy but really you want as much water as possible.
Depends on how the water lines to your house run.
Not Icelandic, but I’ve been following the situation closely.
This is an evolving issue. Grindavik, the town on the far side of this has been severely damaged by earthquakes and is currently surrounded by a berm that’s (mostly) holding the lava flow back. The Svartsengi power plant is likewise protected by a berm and has had the pipes supplying hot water to Reikiavik damaged and repaired.
Geologist Sean Willsey has been providing outstanding coverage on the subject.
I’ve been there on tour once, and I just looked at an online map to make sure I didn’t misremember. I also follow a guy on YouTube that talks about geology and has been focused on Iceland lately, so I think that makes me a complete expert.
Joking aside, the road to Grindavik is sort of out of the way, but it is the connector road between the south coast and the airport, so it’s like a 45 minute diversion to get to the airport from the south coast (and vice versa). And like an hour+ diversion if you’re going from the south coast to the Blue Lagoon/the geothermal power/hot water plant that provides power and heat to the airport and (I think) most of Reykjavik.
Unfortunately the power plant/Blue Lagoon is very close to the fissure, and it’s possible a future larger lava flow could damage them. (It is expected more fissures/flows will occur, but the location and size are unknown.) I’m sure both the civil engineering and tourism folks are working on spinning up alternative sites.Grindavik, for what it’s worth, keeps bouncing between being evacuated and residents griping so much they get let back in. The Icelandic government has an offer on the table to purchase people’s homes in the town, so they move out. I think the plan is probably to abandon the town, since it’s possible this eruptive period could last hundreds of years. (Or not! We have no idea, really, just past data and informed guesses.)
I’ll have you know, I have pretty high standards to consider someone an expert.
I’ve been there on tour once, and I just looked at an online map to make sure I didn’t misremember. I also follow a guy on YouTube that talks about geology and has been focused on Iceland lately, so I think that makes me a complete expert.
Oh, no! You’re meeting all of them!
You misspelled “Oh, yes!”
I’m guessing driving the other way around would help and boats. But I’m not an expert.
The ring road around the country is about 1300km, so it’s clearly a pretty big hassle, but not a complete disaster, unless the entire area around the main intersection is blocked.
I don’t think you have travel the whole ring road. But I believe both roads in and out areclosed.
I like the way there’s a police car there, in case people were thinking they might just go for it anyway
Imagine this would happen in the US! The police would have shot the lava!
EDIT: For the Downvoters: Of course they would have shot the lava. Have you seen it? Its black!
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Jeep Owners have entered the chat
ԀՈ ƎᗡIS SIHꞱ
I saw a Juck with the doors taken off the other day.
Like a pidgeon wearing floaties.
So fat tires?
Yah, Jeep guys would have never done that.
I visited Iceland, not too long ago. The tour guides, politely, made a point of illustrating how much of a rude menace tourists can be with their rental cars. We got a pass, of course, as we were on a tour bus every time this happened. The message was clear: use the world-class public transit and charter busses/tours where possible.
My perspective as a tourist: the cops really are needed in situations like this.
World class public transit? Lol you can hardly get from the airport to Reykjavik, you absolutely need a rental car if you want to enjoy Iceland
Iceland is actually one of the most car dependant countries in the entire world
People who make money by shepherding people on buses are fans of bus travel.
Huh.
By the way guys in this country it’s immoral to drive
You clearly don’t know people
“It’s rock, right?”
Wow, it’s sure smells bad out here. Is anyone >yawn< else getting sleepy?
I mean, my first thought was “i wonder if you could drive across that.” But I’m also smart enough to not be the first person to try… maybe the second though
Mine was "Man that water is really dark, I hope nobody tries to drive through it. Wait…
The others are already safely across in Grindavik, you’re fine.
The top layer is.
Today, someone jumped over the construction barriers on an escalator that was under construction. They fell into the open hole in the escalator, got seriously hurt, and then had the audacity to complain to metro police officers that there was a hole in the escalator for some reason. The police had the grace to not admonish him for being a moron. Both ends were blocked with construction barriers ~4.5 feet high by 3.5 feet deep, and the elevator was right by them, lol. It was very difficult for someone to even vault over in the first place.
