On August 26, CBS posted a news item called: ‘Iceland prepares for “Volcano from Hell.”’ Of course, Icelanders (and others) have heard the stories about volcanoes being the gateway to hell before. Hekla, Iceland’s most famous volcano, was thought to house demons that danced around the crater and at Askja, just north of the current eruption, tourists bathe in a crater called Víti, which means ‘Hell.’
At the time people were afraid that a sub-glacial eruption might begin at any moment. Let’s go to that news item:
“This could be the volcano from hell,” said CBS news contributor and City University of New York physics professor Michio Kaku. “To quote Yogi Berra, ‘It’s deja vu all over again.’ Remember the paralysis from four years ago? Millions of passengers being stranded with the threat of airplanes falling from the sky?”
“This is not an ordinary volcanic eruption,” he said. “You have fine magmatic dust in the air. It could potentially cut through a glacier—freezing—causing a gasified, rocky, pebbly cloud to arise, and that gets in to an engine and chews up the gears, chews up the blades. So this ash coming out is not typical ash. That’s why ice volcanoes are more dangerous than typical volcanoes.”
Photo: Ragnar Th. Sigurðsson.
Luckily, we are not there yet. But the pictures shown here, taken by photographer Ragnar Th. Sigurðsson can give you that eerie feeling that Hell is not so far away.
