Two Risso’s dolphins washed ashore in Hrútafjörður in Northwest Iceland last week. Risso dolphins are a warm-water species found a bit to the east of Ireland and Northwest Scotland. But the largest number is found further south, in warmer seas.
The ubiquitous midge is almost completely absent from Mývatn, the pointedly named ‘Midge Lake,’ this year. Árni says this happens every seven to nine years—it’s now been about eight since the last time the midge population collapsed. As a result, the bird population will be much smaller for the next two to three years.
Icelandic glaciers have been losing mass since the Little Ice Age, but that process has slowed over the last decade thanks to the influence of what scientists have dubbed the Blue Blob, “an area of regional cooling in the North Atlantic Ocean to the south of Greenland.
Residents in Hafnarfjörður, a small town just outside the capital area, have rescued multiple swans that have frozen to the icy surface of Hamarkotslækur creek during a recent spate of desperately cold weather in the country, RÚV reports.
Twenty people were rescued from a chairlift at the Hlíðarfjall ski area outside Akureyri. The lift stalled when the wire was blown off its spool by a strong blast of wind.
The Icelandic Food and Veterinary Authority (MAST) has reason to suspect that a bacterial disease called Brucella canis has been found in dogs in Iceland. RÚV reports that Bruncella canis can—in very rare instances—be transmitted from dogs to humans, with young children, pregnant, and immunocompromised people at the greatest risk of serious infection.
The glacial outburst flood, or jökulhlaup, which started when the ice sheet in the Grímsvötn volcano beneath Vatnajökull glacier began to melt 11 days ago, is predicted to reach its peak on Sunday. At time of writing, the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration does not believe that the runoff will affect traffic on Route 1 […]
Saturday’s incident is notable as Bárðarbunga, a stratovolcano located underneath Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull, is the second largest volcano on the island. Geophysicist Páll Einarsson told reporters, however, that the powerful earthquakes underneath the volcano this summer were likely due to land rise and that an eruption did not appear to be imminent.
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