Seismic Signs of magma pathways through the Crust in the Eyjafjallajökull

volcano, South Iceland

The article was written by Sigurlaug Hjaltadóttir, Kristín S. Vogfjörð and Ragnar Slunga from the
Icelandic meteorological office. It explains the methods used to detect earthquakes and their
correlation with volcanic activity in southern Iceland. They developed a new system to improve
the accuracy of the detection of seismic activity using new technologies like GPS, seismographers
and computer analysis of the data. They discovered that the earthquakes happened in similar
places or ‘’clusters’’ that pin point the location of magma channels and storages beneath the
surface.

This is consistent with the plate tectonics theory because Iceland is right on the border between
the North American plate and the Eurasian plate. That causes the abundant volcanic and seismic
activity in that region of the world. The earthquakes seem to happen always at the same locations
and close to places with high volcanic activity. The magma is deforming the crust close to the
volcanoes. Also there are layers of reversely magnetized rock which can tell scientists how long the
volcano has been active.