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An eruption has begun north of Grindavík
- numlocked 3y agoAbout an hour drive from Reykjavík, Iceland.
- dylan604 3y agoThat's not very helpful for people not from Iceland as far as indicating distance. An hour drive doing 60mph is totally different from windy roads along a coast line or through valleys. Google Maps isn't too useful: "Sorry, we could not calculate driving directions from "Reykjavík, Iceland" to "Grindavik, Iceland"
- meheleventyone 3y agoIt’s about 50km from downtown Reykjavik a lot of which is along the main artery route to the international airport.
- mhb 3y agoLavacam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqudj0x0POA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqudj0x0POA
- kreeben 3y agoOne house already on fire. That whole neighborhood seems pretty screwed.
- rightbyte 3y agoAt least that edge of it. Imagine owning the house over the road where the lava is heading right now, watching the disaster in slow motion. I guess the lava flow could stop right in front of it? Edit: Nevermind ...
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoIceland has socialised National Catastrophe Insurance. The premiums are very low but if your house is lava'd or avalanched you get a reasonable payout. Of course it's better if that doesn't happen, but if it does there's solid support for the victims.
- bitcharmer 3y agoThis would never happen in the USA. Pure communism
- roywiggins 3y agoThe American equivalent is probably the national flood insurance program.
- FireBeyond 3y agoThe annoying thing about that is that it lets people repeatedly keep building in exactly the same spot. Not without an inconvenience, but it's almost like "every time it floods enough you get a home upgrade".
- everybodyknows 3y agoPeople can afford beachfront houses often have friends in high places.
- Fatnino 3y agoThat insurance not cheap.
- justin66 3y agoBut it is subsidized by one’s fellow taxpayers.
- johndunne 3y agoHopefully, everyone is safe. But what of the homes? I'm interested to know what generally occurs, in terms of insurance, when homes and property are destroyed by lava flow? Is there insurance coverage for such events? Are the homeowners covered to rebuild/buy new homes elsewhere?
- layer8 3y agoSee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38991051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38991051.
- laveur 3y agoYeah they evacuated the entire town from what I heard. So there is no danger to any lives. I'm pretty sure the city has accepted that as long as no one dies, that everything else can burn.
- sixothree 3y agoThis may be a dumb question but near me is a cement factory that (incidentally) makes stackable concrete blocks the size of a car. They stack them multiple stories high and multiple blocks deep, at least while being stored at the factory. What about lava makes it so we can’t redirect the flow around neighborhoods with these things?
- kabouseng 3y agoLava is molten rock. Concrete blocks are rock.
- ygra 3y agoAlso from the blog: > Benedikt Halldórsson of the Met Office says houses are not designed to withstand lava flow. > »... You can expect the walls to give way from the load, and the heat in the lava is such that it burns everything in its path.« Apart from the heat, since it's molten rock it also has considerable mass, and the lava flow continues pushing from behind.
- jon_richards 3y agoOne weird realization I had is that lava is over three times as dense as water, so if you tired to “swim” in it, you’d basically just sit on top.
- dylan604 3y agoThat's not what happened to Gollum
- ceejayoz 3y ago“Sit” might not be the right verb here.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoit is less about density and more about viscosity, which depends on the type and temperature. I had an opportunity to interact with lava during a Hawaii eruption, and people could run/walk across red hot and flowing lava, but it would start melting the bottom of your shoes. This lava was definitely on the colder end of the spectrum, with a consistency like bread dough. On the the other end of the specturm, there are very hot low viscosity lavas similar in consistency to soup. If you tried to step on that, it would be like falling into a pool.
- pfdietz 3y agoThe lava has reached the edge of the town. A man was lost in a crack in the town a few days ago, falling into the crack, then into a hole leading to a larger chamber underneath. The chamber had water in it experiencing tidal flow. His body was not recovered. If magma erupts into such cracks it could cause steam explosions (phreatic or phreatomagmatic eruptions).
- foliveira 3y agoUpdate from this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsDBgjgEtnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsDBgjgEtnU
- jarmitage 3y agoDonate to Icelandic Red Cross here: https://www.raudikrossinn.is/styrkja/stakur-styrkur/ https://www.raudikrossinn.is/styrkja/stakur-styrkur/
- andrewflnr 3y agoEven if the lava doesn't destroy too many buildings, can the town survive the dual shocks of the ground under all the rest of the buildings being unstable, and uncertainty about whether any further investment in the town will be obliterated by a future eruption? The long term looks bleak to me.
- 19h 3y agoIt's crazy to think that just one week before all of this started me and my girlfriend were hiking to Gunnuhver hot springs and stayed at pretty much the exact spot over the night where the eruption happened next to Grindavik, mostly because there's nearly absolute darkness ... except for the bright light above Grindavik that looks like an island of light in the middle of nowhere, it was really magical. Iceland is such a beautiful place.. although I was angry and sad for most part of the trip seeing how tourism changed Iceland over the last 20 years. As recently as 2014 we had to ask the locals in mostly sign language and paper maps how to navigate the Westfjords; there's 5G now in even the last corner of the island.. guess I'll need to resort to Svalbard and Greenland to go truly off-grid in the future :-)