Giant Undersea Volcano Found Off Iceland

[Dover]

Giant Undersea Volcano Found Off Iceland
Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News

April 22, 2008


The active Krafla volcano (above) in northwestern Iceland boasts a lake inside its 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) caldera. A newfound underwater volcano off Iceland's coast has a similarly sized caldera—and it's only a matter of time before the submarine mountain erupts, scientists say.


A giant and unusual underwater volcano lies just offshore of Iceland on the Reykjanes Ridge, volcanologists have announced.

The Reykjanes formation is a section of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which bisects the Atlantic Ocean where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are pulling apart.

As magma wells up from the rift between the plates, it cools to form ridges.

But it doesn't generally form giant volcanoes, said Ármann Höskuldsson, a University of Iceland volcanologist who was part of the international team that discovered the volcano last summer.

That's because mid-ocean ridges are constantly pulling apart, making it harder for large volcanoes to form without being torn asunder.

"We were doing a normal oceangoing mission, and we found a big edifice" about 90 miles (150 kilometers) south of Iceland, Höskuldsson said.

The structure turned out to be an active volcano that rises about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) above the surrounding sections of the ridge, coming within 1,300 feet (400 meters) of the surface.

...cont'd

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/52527.html

[rasputin1952]

1. If that caldera blows, at 1300 feet below the surface, the resulting

devastation would be horrendous. The scenario is almost too horrible to think about.

[kestrel91316]

2. Wasn't the island of Surtsey formed this same way just a couple of decades ago?

This is SOP for the geology of the area......