I lived in Fairbanks three years!
On the night of 23/24 July 2014 (around midnight) there was a large landslide in the SE corner of the steep inner wall of the 1875 AD caldera at the Askja volcano in central Iceland. This event is simply the latest (albeit large and spectacular) of many that have formed the current water-filled caldera of Öskjuvatn (Askja lake). It is part of the ongoing process of the formation of this youngest caldera at Askja, which is after all only 139 years old and which after its initiation in 1875 took several decades (until c.1932) to get close to the shape we see today.
This blog post contains images from before and after the landslide. I was fortunate to be doing fieldwork nearby (collecting samples from basalt subglacial mountains) when I heard that access to the ‘safe’ area above the lake had just been granted. So we went there on the…
View original post 1,445 more words
