There is much more to Iceland than the current eruptions on Reykjanes Peninsula.
For example, there are the Westman Islands, rising out of the sea from a volcanic field located just off Iceland’s south coast.
They’re beautiful!
Only one of these islands has year-round residents: Heimaey, where Icelanders saved their town’s harbor by spraying seawater on an advancing lava flow during a 1973 eruption.
You can visit Heimaey —
— but you cannot visit the newest Westman Island, called Surtsey, which blasted its way above the waves in 1963, as shown for a few seconds at the start of this video before footage of the 1973 Heimaey eruption:
Surtsey, named after the Nordic fire giant Surtur (who sometimes breaks the Bifrost bridge when riding across it with his pals), is quiet now.
They made it off limits because this is the perfect setting to study how life naturally establishes itself on inhospitable places.
The UNESCO page brings us up to date on Life’s progress there so far. Nature works very, very slowly.
Surtsey’s birth
No human witnesses were present when the seafloor south of existing Westman Islands in 1963 cracked open and pillow lava began to ooze out and accumulate around the vent.
On what day?
Many forms of modern volcano monitoring weren’t available in the mid-twentieth century, so it’s difficult to say.
Experts suspect that the eruption began some time between November 6, when Westman villagers first reported a swarm of mild earthquakes, and November 12, when strong sulfur smells were noted and a seismograph in Reykjavik picked up ten hours of harmonic tremor.
The ocean isn’t very deep here, only about 420 feet or so. As the lava pile got taller, nearing the surface, water column pressure on it lessened and lava-seawater interactions began to generate explosions.
On November 14, 1963, at around 7:30 in the morning, a fishing boat nineteen miles off Iceland’s southern coast and a little more than twelve miles south of Heimaey investigated what appeared to be smoke from a burning boat.
Its crew very quickly realized that this was no ship, it was a new volcano!
No one had a phone to record the event because it was 1963, but similar, more recent submarine eruptions suggest that what those sailors saw was something like the opening sequence of this “Stupendous Submarine Volcanoes” video from Getty:
The ocean around Surtsey that morning likely was stained with greenish-yellow sulfuric material; at one end of this marine plume, huge quantities of seawater boiled and exploded into jets of white steam and dark gray ash — an eruption style that is now called “surtseyan.”
The video gets to Surtsey at around 1:18, but back in 1963, there the island suddenly was on November 15: a brand new addition to the Westman chain!
It looked like this on November 30th. (Image: Howell Williams/NOAA via Wikimedia).
The island’s one-day formation was surprisingly fast, drawing scientific attention that began on November 15, 1963, and continues to this day, particularly through Iceland’s Surtsey Research Institute.
These views are labeled 1963 and 1964:
Surtsey’s eruption intensity kept up for three and a half years, building not only a large island but also one pyroclastic cone nearby (called Surtla) that never breached the sea as well as two additional islands (Syrtlingur and Jolnir) that briefly appeared until the North Atlantic’s powerful waves quickly decapitated them.
Surtsey might have met this fate, too, but it grew so quickly that, from 1964 on, the sea no longer could reach its vents.
That ended the amazing surtseyan plumes, but beautiful Hawaiian-style lava flows and fountaining took over, as shown at the start of this video —
Yes, those lava ramparts and flows on 1960s Surtsey look exactly like the recent group of eruptions that twenty-first-century Iceland has been hosting on its Reykjanes Peninsula.
It’s the same general type of lava — mid-ocean ridge basalt with some contribution from the Iceland hotspot’s upwelling mantle material — although Surtsey formed in a different region known as the Eastern Volcanic Zone.
If any of the next Reykjanes Peninsula eruptions happen offshore, then we will see surtseyan-type activity there, too!
Surtseyan eruptions
“Surtseyan” wasn’t in anyone’s vocabulary in 1963, any more than “Surtsey” was — until it rose out of the Atlantic — but scientists had witnessed a similar but much smaller eruption in the Azores (jargon alert) a few years earlier.
They decided that this type of eruption through a body of water now deserved its own name.
As “surtseyan” entered the scientific dictionary, its namesake was transforming into a survivor.
Lava gave Surtsey an advantage in 1964 by providing it with an erosion-proof outer shell that withstood the North Atlantic’s harsh conditions long enough for the new land’s loose basaltic debris to consolidate into resistant tuff like that seen on other Westman Islands that have resisted the waves and the wind for thousands of years.
Surtsey therefore will be with us for at least a couple of millennia, although the volcano is dark now, just trembling a bit and actively degassing.
No geological drama now, but life is finding its way on that seemingly barren rock.
.
There is no word yet from Asgard, but after 1963 the Bifrost probably needed to be repaired.
Again.
Even today those old Surtsey eruption videos are impressive — just imagine the impact they had on 1960s TV audiences who were only starting to discover the world from the comfort of their living room sofa.
Surtsey — now an international “celebrity” — outperformed Hollywood, and it wasn’t even make-believe!
Many of those dark plumes, rising up to five miles or more above sea level, do look like feathers, so their “roostertail” nickname is understandable.
What surprised me, while researching this episode, was a comment in one research paper (Greenbank et al.) that these eruptions are silent.
Obvious sound effects have been added to both of the videos linked earlier. The gunfire soundtrack is jarring, but we accept noise because surely the volcano must have made a terrible racket, as most explosive eruptions do.
Right?
Well, there are no “booms” when a pot boils over on the kitchen stove (whose burner can be as hot as lava).
The activity in Surtsey’s vent involved water and heat, too, though it also included a “slurry” of volcanic debris that gave the water some oomph when it met hot lava, resulting in those spectacular roostertail plumes.
There probably was some sizzling — and falling lava fragments must have made noise upon impact — but when you think about it, why should surtseyan roostertail plumes and steam jetting go “boom”?
From November 15, 1963, on through the present, scientists have intensively studied Surtsey and its eruption in many ways.
It isn’t possible to look at that vast amount of information in a single episode, but many links in the source list will take you to more of these fascinating details.
And in the Westman Islands, sailors probably still wonder whether Surtsey will erupt again or if an even newer island will surface.
Either way, Science now has the means to record it all and learn more about how this planet Earth makes dry land out of the seafloor in such a spectacular fashion.
Monitoring:
Surtsey is monitored as part of the Westman (Vestmannaeyjar) Islands. The current status of all volcanoes in this chain is at background normal level (Aviation Code Green); if and when that changes, the Icelandic Met Office will issue a notice here: https://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/volcanoes/vona-notifications/
More information:
Global Volcanism Program: https://volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn=372010
Surtsey Research Institute (via Google Translate). 2024. https://surtsey-is.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
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Sources include:
Greenbank, E.; McGuinness, M. J.; and Schipper, C. I. 2021. A theoretical model of Surtseyan bomb fragmentation. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 477(2253): 20210166.
Jackson, M. D.; Couper, S.; Stan, C. V.; Ivarsson, M.; and others. 2019. Authigenic mineral texture in submarine 1979 basalt drill core, Surtsey volcano, Iceland. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 20(7): 3751-3773.
Klemetti, E. 2009. Rooster Tails and New Islands (and Video, Too). https://www.wired.com/2009/03/rooster-tails-and-new-islands-and-video-too/
___. 2011. Hydrovolcanism: When Magma and Water Mix. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/hydrovolcanism-when-magma-and-water-mix
Oregon State, Volcano World 2001. Surtsey, Iceland. https://volcano.oregonstate.edu/sites/volcano.oregonstate.edu/files/oldroot/volcanoes/volc_images/europe_west_asia/surtsey.html
Prause, S.; Weisenberger, T. B.; Kleine, B. I.; Monien, P.; and others. 2022. Alteration of basaltic glass within the Surtsey hydrothermal system, Iceland–Implication to oceanic crust seawater interaction. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 429: 107581. (Snippets only.)
Schipper, C. I.; Jakobsson, S. P.; White, J. D.; Palin, J. M.; and Bush-Marcinowski, T. 2015. The Surtsey magma series. Scientific Reports, 5(1): 11498.
UNESCO. 2024. Surtsey. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1267/
University of Alaska, Fairbanks. 1988. Of volcanoes and boiling water. https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/volcanoes-and-boiling-water
Vaughan, R. G., and Webley, P. W. 2010. Satellite observations of a surtseyan eruption: Hunga Ha’apai, Tonga. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 198(1-2): 177-186.
Verolino, A.; White, J. D.; Baxter, R. J.; Schipper, C. I.; and Thordarson, T. 2022. Characteristics of sub-aerially emplaced pyroclasts in the Surtsey eruption deposits: Implications for diverse Surtseyan eruptive styles. Geosciences, 12(2): 79.
Volcano Cafe. 2018. Surtsey — The birth of the modern world. https://www.volcanocafe.org/surtsey-the-birth-of-the-modern-world/
___. 2018. The fall of Surtsey. https://www.volcanocafe.org/the-fall-of-surtsey/
Volcano Watch. 2018. The mixture of lava and seawater creates an explosive hazard. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/news/volcano-watch-mixture-lava-and-seawater-creates-explosive-hazard
Wikipedia (Icelandic, via Google Translate). 2024. Surtsey. https://is-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Surtsey?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp Last accessed February 18, 2024.
___. 2024. Surtur. https://is-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Surtur?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp Last accessed February 18, 2024.
Flight To Wonder 