Eyjafjallajökull

- from NASA, Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, Iceland

I've been reading at Wikipedia about Eyjafjallajökull ...

... one of the smaller glaciers of Iceland .... The icecap of the glacier covers a volcano (1,666 metres or 5,466 ft in height) which has erupted relatively frequently since the Ice Age, at times bringing rhyolite to the surface. The volcano erupted twice in 2010, on 20 March and 15 April .... The south end of the mountain was once part of the island's Atlantic coastline. As the sea has since retreated some 5 kilometres (3.1 mi), the former coastline has left behind sheer cliffs with a multitude of beautiful waterfalls, of which the best known is Skógafoss .....



The eruption is thought to have begun on 20 March 2010, about 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) east of the top crater of the volcano in a popular hiking region called Fimmvörðuháls. This first eruption, in the form of a fissure vent, did not occur under the glacier and was smaller in scale than had been feared by some geologists. On 14 April 2010 Eyjafjallajökull resumed erupting after a brief pause, this time from the top crater in the centre of the glacier, causing meltwater floods (also known as jökulhlaup) to rush down the nearby rivers, and requiring 800 people to be evacuated. This eruption was explosive in nature and is estimated to be ten to twenty times larger than the previous one in Fimmvörðuháls. This second eruption threw volcanic ash several kilometres up in the atmosphere which led to travel disruptions in northwest Europe on the 15th and 16th of April 2010 including the closure of airspace over most of Northern Europe ...



Check out the webcam - Eyjafjallajökull frá Þórólfsfelli