Iceland Volcanoes

Iceland has been in the news of late due to Eyjafjallajokull, one of the many volcanoes erupting and bringing many Europe's airports to a halt from all the ash in the air. Since we were there almost 2 yrs ago now, I thought I would look back and see if we had any "before" pictures. We drove right through the area on the way back to Reykjavik. The picture above is of a volcano called Katla, which is also in the news. Katla is a much bigger volcano than Eyjafjallajokull and it is just east of it. It's peak is usually covered with clouds as it was when we were there. Everytime in history that Eyjafjallajokull has erupted, Katla has also erupted soon after. The icelandic people worry more about Katla, because the glacier that covers it is alot larger and so there would be more ash thrown in the air and larger flooding if it were to erupt as well. There's also a small city at the base of it where more people would be in trouble if it did erupt.

We did explore the area a little bit one day. We drove up and then hiked to a glacier called Solheimajokull, which is just a little east of Eyjafjallajokull. That's the picture below. The glacier is coming down on the right side there. So, this is the closest picture we have of Eyjafjallajokull--it would be one of the peaks on the far left of this picture. Solheimajokull is a glacier that is part of the larger glacier called Myrdalsjokull that is covering Katla.

Here's Sara and Nolan hiking up to Solheimajokull, hoping that Katla doesn't decide to erupt any time soon. This also is a good picture of all the hardened volcanic ash and debris from the previous Katla eruptions. That's all the black stuff she's walking on. It looks like this all the way out to the ocean.

Here's the happy family at the base of the glacier:

Here's a pic of our little 2 door hatchback Toyota Yaris rental car off in the distance. I don't think driving on a volcanic ash field was an approvable use of the rental car. We didn't do any major damage to it and we took it as far as we could and then hiked the rest of the way.