Recent discoveries from Iceland’s Fagradalsfjall eruptions alter what we know about how volcanoes work. Learning something that fundamentally changes how we understand our world doesn't happen very often. But for University of California, Santa Barbara Earth scientist Matthew Jackson and the thou
Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland erupting at night.
While sampling magma from the Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland, Jackson and his colleagues uncovered a process far more dynamic than anyone had assumed in the two centuries that scientists have been studying volcanoes. Thanks to a sabbatical, a pandemic, and 780 years of melting subterranean rock, Jackson was in the right place and time to witness the birth of Fagradalsfjall, a fissure in the lowlands of southwest Iceland that split and exploded with magma in March 2021. By that time, everyone on the Reykjanes Peninsula was ready for some kind of eruption, he said.
“The assumption was that a magma chamber fills up slowly over time, and the magma becomes well mixed,” Jackson explained. “And then it drains over the course of the eruption.” As a result of this well-defined two-step process, he added, those studying volcanic eruptions do not expect to see significant changes in the chemical composition of the magma as it flows out of the earth.
“Picture a lava lamp in your mind,” Jackson said. “You have a hot lightbulb at the bottom, it heats up a blob and the blob rises, cools, and then sinks. We can think of the Earth’s mantle — from the top of the core to under the tectonic plates — operating much like a lava lamp.
“We often don’t have a record of the first stages of most eruptions because these get buried by lava flows from the later stages,” he said. This project, according to the researchers, allowed them to see for the first time a phenomenon that was thought to be possible but had never been witnessed directly.
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