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Volcano Erupts In Iceland
Reports are coming in that a volcano in Iceland called Grimsvotn has erupted, sending plumes of smoke 15km into the air. It was accompanied by a series of earthquakes, but all of them have been minor so far, and scientists don't believe the eruption will cause problems for air travel like 2010's Eyjafjallajokull event. Local coverage in Icelandic is available, as well as early pictures of the eruption.
Even though this is purely coincidentally, all the believers of the May 21 "rapture" are going to cite this as evidence.
Fail.
You know at least half the people over there had this thought cross their minds, "Shit, I hedged my bets wrong"
If by Slavic you mean North Germanic,[ 1] then yes.
Has there or has there not been an increase in weather and seismic events on the planet of late?
No.
Of course it could be that the news is making a much bigger deal than ever before and I never noticed before and now take more notice of these things.
Yes.
Wait, isn't saying "a volcano erupted in Iceland" like saying "a bag of rice fell over in China"?
I mean come on, the whole thing is basically a set of the biggest active volcanoes on the whole fault line, with some grass on them.
I say "some grass", because the rest is still dead land from the last giant magma flow.
Grímsvötn has been erupting semi-regularly for decades; in the last twenty years there have been eruptions in 1996, 1998, 2004, and now 2011. While long-term volcano prediction is more of an art than a science, there's no particular reason to believe that this eruption is related to either the Eyjafjallajökull eruption or to the still-apparently-quiescent (keep your fingers crossed) Katla. Grímsvötn is actually quite a distance from Katla: roughly 150 km. Eyjafjallajökull is much closer to Katla (just 30 km) and the initial smaller eruption last year (on Fimmvörðuháls) was nearer still.
~Idarubicin
No, I really doubt that. 1) Icelanders are not idiots. 2) It's fucking Iceland. This is hardly the first time they've seen some volcanic activity.
Had this been in biblebelt kansas, maybe you'd be right.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
There just wern't any true believers to take to heaven.
This. We have had no new volcanoes in the US for decades. The ones we have are getting quite old, but have been operating safely - there have only been minor incidents and occasional loss of life. Instead of learning from the mistakes of other countries (Look at Krakatoa or Pompeii) and having safe volcanoes, they refuse to allow any new volcanoes at all. Meanwhile, earthquakes kill far more people, but we do nothing about them!
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.