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IPFS News Link • Natural Disasters

Iceland's got a volcano problem -- and it's only going to get worse

• http://www.techinsider.io, Cody Sullivan

Iceland has always been a volcanically active island, but global climate change and the resulting melting ice will make things worse.

One of the best-known eruptions lately was the country's famously hard-to-pronounce volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, which erupted for three weeks straight in 2010, disrupting international air travel throughout Europe, stranding travelers and disrupting the economy there.

Volcanoes erupt when rocks melt and form magma deep underground. Because magma is lighter than solid rock it rises up through nooks and crannies to pool in magma chambers below the Earth's surface. An eruption occurs once a chamber fills, and the magma has nowhere else to go but up.

These kinds of eruptions could become way more common according to two new studies from the Geophysical Research Letters and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. As greenhouse gasses warm the Earth, water frozen in glaciers and ice fields melts and flows off land and into the sea.