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Nov 11, 2023Liked by Judith A Hubbard

Nice article! Couple of minor corrections - the Upptyppingar intrusion in 2007-2008 has no link to the 2014-15 Bárðarbunga eruption. It is in a separate volcanic system. There was no clear precursory seismicity or deformation in the lead up to the August 2014 dike intrusion. And for the final few figures zoomed in to show seismicity on the Reykjanes Peninsula I would advise using the Icelandic Met Office catalogue (downloadable from skjalftalisa.vedur.is) rather than regional/global catalogues - a lot of the scatter here (particularly N-S) that you interpret as triggered earthquakes are just mislocations. It's such a small area that even 5-10 km location errors make a huge difference to the picture!

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Thanks! I just updated the article regarding the 2014-2015 eruption, and removed the comment about triggered earthquakes. Thanks for the link to the Icelandic catalog; we were looking in the wrong place before. Indeed, when I plotted up the seismicity in their system I see that the scattered seismicity is absent. We will try to ingest their catalog into our code; if we're successful, we'll update the plots above.

It's always a humbling experience to write about a new place and realize how much we have to learn; I really appreciate your careful fact-checking!

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No worries. I've enjoyed following your articles over the past months - it's nice to see one in my research area! For the catalogue download (in case it's helpful), you need to do it by year (max duration selectable in one go), then click menu button (top right), Skjáftafla (top left), then Saekja (bottom left) to download. Certainly took me a while to work out (:

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Hi Tom, As Kyle said, he scraped the data, and now all of our plots reflect IMO data - pretty cool to see how well the more precise data map out the faults and volcanic activity! There are so many small events that we had to modify some of our plotting styles to show what was going on, but we tried to stick to the same overall images so as not to modify the post too much. Thanks again for the suggestion!

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Hi Tom, I'm currently re-plotting the overview map with the 2009-2023 data. As you say, the interface is pretty hard to figure out, but once you know what to do the repetition isn't too bad. I have had to figure out how to scrape many different earthquake catalogs; this one is actually pretty reasonable as far as manual downloads go. When I saw the first table with 10 events and links to 2,345 more pages, I was a bit discouraged, but "Saekja" did the trick!

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I remember the Eyjafjallajökull eruption of 2010. And I was in Italy. I had clients who couldn't fly out for a week and every day I'd gave a thin layer of dust all over the car. Totally different than when Etna is active.

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Yes, that was a real wake-up call about how even small eruptions can be wildly disruptive! In that case, the presence of the glacier on top of the volcano meant that the eruption became much more explosive than it otherwise would have been. (Water drives much of the explosivity, and also cooled the erupting material very quickly, causing it to fragment into tiny bits of sharp "ash".)

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