By Kat Kerlin, UC Davis
Spectacular eruptions at Bárðarbunga volcano in central Iceland have been spewing lava continuously since Aug. 31. Massive amounts of erupting lava are connected to the destruction of supercontinents and dramatic changes in climate and ecosystems.
New research from UC Davis and Aarhus University in Denmark shows that high mantle temperatures miles beneath the Earth’s surface are essential for generating such large amounts of magma. In fact, the scientists found that the Bárðarbunga volcano lies directly above the hottest portion of the North Atlantic mantle plume.
The study, published online Oct. 5 and appearing in the November issue of Nature Geoscience, comes from Charles Lesher, professor of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Davis and a visiting professor at Aarhus University, and his former PhD student, Eric Brown, now a post-doctoral scholar at Aarhus University.
“From time to time the Earth’s mantle belches out huge quantities of magma on a scale unlike anything witnessed in historic times,” Lesher said. “These events provide unique windows into the internal working of our planet.”
Such fiery events have produced large igneous provinces throughout Earth’s history. They are often attributed to upwelling of hot, deeply sourced mantle material, or “mantle plumes.”
Recent models have dismissed the role of mantle plumes in the formation of large igneous provinces, ascribing their origin instead to chemical anomalies in the shallow mantle.
Based on the volcanic record in and around Iceland over the last 56 million years and numerical modeling, Brown and Lesher show that high mantle temperatures are essential for generating the large magma volumes that gave rise to the North Atlantic large igneous provinces bordering Greenland and northern Europe.
Their findings further substantiate the critical role of mantle plumes in forming large igneous provinces.
“Our work offers new tools to constrain the physical and chemical conditions in the mantle responsible for large igneous provinces,” Brown said. “There’s little doubt that the mantle is composed of different types of chemical compounds, but this is not the dominant factor. Rather, locally high mantle temperatures are the key ingredient.”
The research was supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation and by the Niels Bohr Professorship funded by Danish National Research Foundation.
Read the full study at http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2264.html.
Video: Lava Fountains from Bardarbunga Volcano Holuhraun Fissure Eruption viewed by Helicopter
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Well it (Iceland) does sit on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge…. I just hope they aren’t thinking this is something that is going to last for years.
Can anyone give the composition of the volatiles associated with the plumes?
I hope Yellowstone isn’t reading this.
It’s not only Bárðarbunga it is whole of Iceland, the gateway to the the North Atlantic SST multidecadal variability we know as the AMO
Exactly, Iceland sits on a on a hotspot.
All the significant seismic action of late has been centered on the Bardarbunga caldera. The fissure vents are just a sideshow. Spectacular yes, but just a sideshow until the main performance at the caldera.
Seismicity for 25 October 2014.
http://i60.tinypic.com/6ifexs.png
http://i61.tinypic.com/f4l6df.png
The caldera earthquake activity is from steady subsidence, as seen from a tab at the top of the same webpage:
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/gps-measurements/bardarbunga/caldera
Said subsidence has been regular and smooth as the magma drains toward the fissure system, suggesting that a catastrophic caldera collapse isn’t necessarily going to happen, although it certainly still could.
There are a lot of ifs in the equation. The overlying glacier is dropping 20-40cm per day and is 850 meters thick. If/when the rock caldera cap collapses, it will be quite a show. Or not.
When the Laki volcano went off across the island in 1783, it caused several years of very serious climate disruption, according to Wikipedia (I know, I know), some 6 million died from the induced crop failures and sulpher dioxide. What if that happened today?
What if the sun decides to shoot a really big flare at us tomorrow?
I continue to think that the real threats to humanity come from these kind of sudden, drastic and unpredictable black swans, not from gradual and easy to adapt to change. Virtually all of our modern infrastructure and technology has been developed in a golden age of warm weather and few natural disasters. We really have no idea how brittle these systems will be when really stressed.
Mark-o-panam,
Keep the liquor cabinet stocked with a bottle of your best and favorite stuff, is my answer to your Black Swan scenario.
This is not news. this has been known for decades, ever since the concept of mantle plume was coined in 1971, Iceland has been one of them.
Quite right, Hans. For instance the mantle plume underlying Iceland was delineated by 3D modelling of seismic data by a paper published in “Nature” in 1997. But as you say, mantle plumes have been known since the 1970’s.
Exactly.
It goes back even further, in that the mantle plume concept builds on J. Tuzo Wilson’s 1963 work on hotspots.
http://www.mantleplumes.org/WebDocuments/Wilson1963.pdf
Here’s a site which keeps close watch on Icelandic volcanoes http://www.jonfr.com/volcano/
Another site focusing on Iceland, but with a more global view: http://volcanocafe.wordpress.com/
The EPA will shut this CO2 emitting hot spot down…there goes icelands carbon credits.
http://www.writerbeat.com/articles/3713-CO2-Feedback-Loop
Well, you have two other very specific, very well-defined and isolated hot spots:
Yellowstone volcano/volcanic valley/caldera – moving now to the east-northeast in a well-evident curve as the north American land mass moves west across it.
Hawaii island hot spot: Also moving east-southeast as the Pacific crust moves west over it.
Iceland?
My opinion is that it could also be a “lucky” meteor impact crater right on the Mid-Atlantic ridge: The ridge is of course active already and is splitting/spreading in a clear ridge formation at the mid-Atlantic ridge all the way around Africa back to the Horn of Africa. But only at Iceland is a massif building up so high and remaining continuously active so long. The rest of the ridge is almost all underwater with very shallow ocean debris deposit fields.
Could Yellowstone and Hawaii also be meteor crater weak spots below the crust so low but so deep that the moving crust goes across the pin point flaw? At Iceland, the tectonic plates don’t move across the fixed hot spot (flaw or deep impact) but otherwise, Iceland behaves the same as the other two.
Mid-Atlantic Ridge
http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2014/10/atlantic_bed_imprinted_in_gravity/14952329-1-eng-GB/Atlantic_bed_imprinted_in_gravity.jpg
The red dots are volcanoes. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(click on the image to enlarge)
My opinion is that it could also be a “lucky” meteor impact crater right on the Mid-Atlantic ridge.
I think it is highly unlikely.
Only area where MAR comes close to a large land mass is Greenland. This in itself should not be very significant, except that Greenland is covered by thick ice layer, which varies on millennial time scale.
the Laurentide ice sheet melting followed by glacial rebound could be the clue: as weight of the Greenland’s ice sheet exerts variable pressure on the crust below the logical ‘relieve’ point would be the nearby MAR fracture, that happened to be Iceland.
I consider that this general area is a critical factor ( as described here ) for the N. Hemisphere’s climate and in particular N. Atlantic’s SST natural variability.
This source reads the red dots are earthquakes.
Regards,
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=132771&org=NSF
Oh, well another case of the ‘settled science’, source for illustration above is European Space Agency
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/10/Atlantic_bed_imprinted_in_gravity
You would have to explain why other large impacts didn’t cause the volcanic activity you postulate. Those spots seem to be fixed and originate very deep, much deeper than an impact fracture and high stress zones. Iceland just seems to be an overactive spot in the mid atlantic ridge.
Now that some people are living so well and have nothing better to do with their time, perhaps a movement will arise to rename these islands … change Greenland to Iceland and Iceland to Volcanoland.
I’m glad that this volcano is doing the Kīlauea routine so far. No big kaboom just pour out lots of lava and make the island bigger. Here’s hoping it continues to vent relatively peacefully.
The lava is not pushing into the ocean, so it’s just making an area higher.
The continuing seismic activity and caldera subsidence at Bárðarbunga could end very badly. Or it could just end. Volcanoes are like that. From http://en.vedur.is/media/jar/Factsheet_Bardarbunga_20141024.pdf :
That’s Vulcanophobic and you should be ashamed of yourself, Volcanoes have been the geography of peace for thousands of years, anyway sedimentary systems have done far worse and are entirely to blame for the occaisional activist Volcano.
CNN Headline: “Volcano Fears Backlash from Tomorrow’s Eruption”
How can you fault an entire geographical feature for the actions of a single hotspot? There’s miles and miles of Iceland which have never once erupted.
OK, maybe they erupted a while ago, killing hundreds, but nothing this week. The graphs are being realigned.
H8ter!
Depends on the size of the fissure eruption. Laki 1783 was also a “peaceful” fissure eruption. As was the Siberian Traps eruptions that caused the largest mass extinction of al 250 million years ago.
I fail to see the significance of the paper. What isn’t blindingly obvious from well understood geology seems to me to be a counter to a strawman argument.
1. is a strawman. It seems to me that plumes can and should correleate with crustal thickness on their own. Indeed, it would be highly significant if plumes and crustal thickness were uncorrelated.
2. Numerical model…. Yipee. Assumption piled on assumption. Not proof. At best a one of many explanation.
3.”We show that subducted crustal material represents less than 10% of mantal source” in the North Atlantic.
STOP THE PRESSES! / sarc.
Given that the last hypothesized subduction any where near what is Iceland today happened no earlier than the late Permian (260 million years ago) in the forming of Pangaea, It is not a surprising finding. Once again, it would have only been news HAD they found high percentages of subducted crustal material in Icelandic magma.
I agree completely with Stephen Rasey. This is a prime example of pointless “me too” research.
If Bárðarbunga is getting its lava directly from a hot plume rather than just a magma chamber, then as postulated, “From time to time the Earth’s mantle belches out huge quantities of magma on a scale unlike anything witnessed in historic times,” Lesher said. “These events provide unique windows into the internal working of our planet.”
Such fiery events have produced large igneous provinces throughout Earth’s history. They are often attributed to upwelling of hot, deeply sourced mantle material, or “mantle plumes.”
We could be in for a long volcanic event. Any strawman will burn instantly as the lava reaches it. Let’s wait.
If the mantle heat is rising, the temperatures of the lower ocean would be affected it would seem. Would this have an effect on the low current out of the Arctic? Anyone have any thoughts about this?
Are you saying that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean? 😉
Last week the current eruption became the largest since Laki. From http://www.jonfr.com/volcano/?p=5165
The Icelandic Met Office reports at http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/articles/nr/2947 say the lava field is over 62 km².
A large map is at http://en.vedur.is/media/jar/myndsafn/full/Yfirlitskort_20141023.jpg – I wonder what WordPress will think about it. The fissure is on the left, in the main area, lava has pushed west a bit, but the current flow is all east and northeast.
Isn’t that a bit unusual; for a volcano to sit over a magma hot spot ?
Who knew ?
some here are almost there with their thinking ……the revised view is that most “mantle plumes” are results of antipodal effects of extra- terrestrial impacts.
http://www.mantleplumes.org/WebDocuments/Antip_hot.pdf
“New research from UC Davis and Aarhus University in Denmark shows that high mantle temperatures miles beneath the Earth’s surface are essential for generating such large amounts of magma. In fact, the scientists found that the Bárðarbunga volcano lies directly above the hottest portion of the North Atlantic mantle plume.”
Give me a break! I studied Geology in the 50s and 60s and we already knew this! How in heck do they figure Iceland came into being!! It lies on the northerly end of the Mid-Atlantic ridge that goes N-S down the centre of the entire basin. It was born of volcanoes on the sea floor! Man, I was amazed that our knowledge that the earth was round in Ancient Greece was forgotten and had to be re-discovered in the 15th century!! These guys are making a re-discovery of something well known for possibly centuries. Hey, Icelanders are always out surveying new land added to it.
http://www.athropolis.ca/arctic-facts/fact-volcanoes.htm
Here is a gravity map of the ridges offshore and while looking at it, also remember the “surprise” discovery of sea floor volcanoes toward Svalbard and the activity along and under Greenland ice similar “scientists” made recently – reported here on WUWT. It is just the well-known Mid-Atlantic Ridge activity – nothing surprising or new. The dishonesty of these blatant plagiarists!
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/HIGP/Faculty/hey/images/Fig.1_Reykjanes_Ridge_1000px.jpg
This article is from 1997:
Pall Einarsson, Bryndis Brandsdottir, Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson,
Helgi Bjornsson, Karl Gronvold and Freysteinn Sigmundsson
Center of the Iceland Hotspot Experiences Volcanic Unrest
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/97EO00237/pdf
@Gary Young Pearse
Iceland happily lies right over the MAR, however, it’s rocks are geochemically distinct from the ridge itself, a fact that hoodwinked lots of geologists for many years. It’s a plume that just happens to coincide over a tectonic spreading ridge (actually a triple junction). Some say (nay I hear you cry) that the impact that caused the plume may even have initiated the ridge formation and the separation of the N American and Eurasian plates.
I’d like to see lots of evidence for this, but I’m not prepared to say nay out of hand. I dislike the impact theory because the ridge is such a neat and long job and with all other impacts in history, I’d expect a buckyball network of ridges not just long, joined ridges around the world. As an engineer (and a geologist), it seems safe to conclude that it began as a tension feature – maybe as the old theory surmised, caused by convection cells in the mantle. The fact that it keeps going (since the Jurassic) is also support for this.
I think what I’m seeing across the sciences is a bit of desperation to discover something as grand as those of the golden age between the Enlightenment and the first half of the 20th century. Technology has enjoyed a golden age but science, not so much. I see scientists horning in on the domaine of engineering because of this – the oxymoron rocket scientist is a classic example and all the silliness on scientists spouting off on renewable energy, carbon sequestration, geoengineering….. when an engineer could have told them these were jokes.
Physics has taken a detour through fantasyland – strings and dark matter, etc. to shore up apparent deficiencies in gravitation in large bodies and quantum mechanics. And modern “settled” climate science is very much a symptom of this unhappiness. CAGW science has been so successful in the quiet years of science, that everyone is jumping on this sparkler, even sociologists, psychologists, poets, film makers hack philosophers, politicians, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.
The “Quiet Science Era” (I’m moved to capitalize it) has also afflicted the Nobel Committee and academies of science who are putting out prizes and awards willy nilly as if they have a limited shelf life. Failed politicians, a president because he is black, terrorists, an ideologue IPCC, a felonious Gleick awarded actually for breaking the law, a Secretary General of the UN who presided over genocide in Rwanda, the leader of the Ship of Fools who, on a mission to chronicle the melting of the southern continent, got a surprise in being stuck in masses of sea ice and violent blizzards that required two ice breaker and helicopters to come to the rescue….. We have the ” Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science” at the U of NSW in Australia – coined in hopefulness after AGW had gone into remission. Yeah, man, we are definitely in a post something or other.
“Desperation to discover” is right! I’m amazed how much of past research in geology is ignored in recently published papers, particularly from geographers and “climate scientists”. People who don’t do their proper literature research and acknowledge prior workers should be given a boot up the bum!
john karajas October 25, 2014 at 7:50 pm
If that’s true, then geographers have no excuse for it, after Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography, long a standard in the field, and whose most basic theme was that geographers should take past work into account.
Brilliant! Say it again! Candy to my mind.
An impact is most implausible, I’m afraid.
Sorry, but I can’t get this out of my head…
Bárðar Bárðar
Bárðarbunga
Bárðar Bárðar
Bárðarbunga
[Caldera:] I can’t stop this feeling
Deep inside of me
(From “Hooked On a Feeling” http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hooked+on+a+feeling )
(Pronounce Bárðarbunga http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=413V0bmjvBg I swear it’s easier than Eyjafjallajökull)
Past nine 48 hour seismic event summaries in the Bardarbunga area:
Notes:
(d) a major increase in activity NE of Askja on 21-23 has subsided. 14 of 23 are more than 24 hrs old. M1.1 largest.
(f) Askja M1.4+ is obtained from the Myvatn map.
(g) There are six quakes at the southern end of the island in what is covered by the Myrdalsjokull Map, the name of another volcano covered by ice. On 21-23 the six are all sub M1.0, but they are growing more frequent and growing in magnitude. 23-25 there are two M1.1 and a third M0.4.
(h) Last night, I made note there were 57 quakes at M3.5 or higher. Tonight there are 41. I went back into my snapshots and filled in a new track for the past two weeks.
The webcams are black again, probably low clouds.
Not much in the news. Eruption still going strong.
Twitter picture: Landsat 8 thermal image from Oct. 24. https://twitter.com/search?q=bardarbunga&src=typd
I’ve been making these tables of two-day activity in previous threads and moving them as they close.
Since this is a fresh Bardarbunga thread, I’ll continue here.
Previous threads with activity postings are:
Oct. 19 thru 24
Oct 5-17
Sep 21 – Oct.3 without tables, haphazard summaries of 3DBulge activity.
Sept 8 – 21
Aug 30 – Sept 7.
[Thank you. .mod]
The M3.5+ count for the past 48 hrs is down to 17 from a peak of 57 two days ago.
Higher mantle temp should mean, over time, higher crust temp, even if localized This in turn will mean higher air/ocean temp over time. Arctic air temp is supposedly up a bit, the north atlantic ocean temp is up a bit. Could all make sense but of course correlation is no causation.
Kevin’s missing heat might now be way down in the mantle. Even though this is the reverse of how he would propose it. But just wait for the next reason for the pause.
The mantle stole it.
There is no mantle plume beneath Iceland. It is a shallow magma pool of unknown provenance. Before building any model based on the assumption of plumes from the deep mantle, it would be wise to check the seismic tomography which indicates the absence of any deep mantle source beneath Iceland.
(Montagner and Ritsema 2001)
The situation is the same for all “mid” ocean ridge locations. Shallow pools. What is interesting is the possibility that volcanism was much higher during earlier non ice age periods of earth history and that some electromagnetic process controls both the ice ages and the magma pools.