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Imminent! The Largest Eruption of Our Time

Expected to affect the UK and the rest of mainland Europe, The Mighty Volcano Katla, with its 10km (6.2 mile) crater, has the potential to cause catastrophic flooding as it melts the frozen surface of its caldera and sends literaly billions of gallons of water surging past Iceland's east coast and into the Atlantic Ocean. 

Located under one of Iceland's largest glaciers there are signs of a looming volcanic eruption that could be one of the most powerful the country has seen in almost a century.

Ford Cochran the National Geographic's expert on Iceland said. "There has been a great deal of seismic activity" There were more than 500 tremors in and around the caldera of Katla just in October, which suggests the motion of magma. "And that certainly suggests an eruption may be imminent."

Scientists in Iceland have been closely monitoring the area since 9 July, when there appears to have been some sort of disturbance that may have been a small eruption.

 

The volume of water produced in a 1755 eruption equalled that of the world's largest rivers combined.

But comprehensive scientific measurements were not available in 1918, so volcanologists have no record of the type of seismic activity that led to that eruption.

All they know is that Katla usually erupts every 40 to 80 years, which suggests the next significant event is long overdue.

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