Image is of the Herðubreið tuya in northeast Iceland, formed when ice sheets covered Iceland thousands of years ago. It's not really relevant to the Grindavik situation but I think they look neat. The title also doesn't make much sense but I saw the pun and took it.
Off in Iceland, different kinds of tunnels are causing problems. Underneath the town of Grindavik in southwestern Iceland, not far from the capital of Reykjavik, tens of thousands of earthquakes are portending the movement of magma in tunnels underneath the peninsula, which could breach the surface and cause an eruption. The 4000 residents of the town have been evacuated as the magma has risen to less than a kilometer below the surface.TRG
Icelandic volcanism is pretty fascinating, with the country sitting on the mid-Atlantic ridge, the birthing line of new oceanic crustal rock running right down the Atlantic ocean for many thousands of kilometers, as well as a hotspot, an upwelling of mantle material of debated origin which also feeds otherwise-inexplicable volcanism in the middle of tectonic plates, like Yellowstone and Hawaii.
An additional factor here is the presence of glaciers. When a volcano erupts underneath a glacier, the melting water cools the lava rapidly, causing features usually seen in volcanoes that erupt under the sea like pillow basalts, but also unique features like tuyas, which are steep-sided but flat-topped volcanoes. The rapid melting of water can also cause glacial floods called jökulhlaups.
Icelandic volcanoes have had significant regional and even global impacts in the past. In 2010, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which was a volcano covered by an ice cap, erupted and the ash cloud spread across Europe, causing airline disruption for about a month which caused nearly $2 billion in total losses for airline companies - though this seems pretty quaint compared to the pandemic's impact on airlines in retrospect. Back in the 1780s, the Laki volcano killed a quarter of the Icelandic population due to sulphur dioxide causing massive crop failure and cattle death. This eruption's impacts spread to Europe and beyond, causing notable worldwide temperature drops and thus crop failures and may well have been a contributing factor to the outbreak of the French Revolution, which obviously heralded the death of the feudal order and the eventual primacy of capitalism in its place. That being said, any eruption at Grindavik is very probably not going to have any significant worldwide impacts - there are over a hundred volcanoes already in Iceland, and regular climate change is doing a great job at causing mayhem right now anyway. It's also still possible that there won't be an eruption at all, at least not in the short to medium term.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Iceland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
This week's update is here!
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
US emissions are significantly underreported due to the rapid expansion of natural gas. Accounting for this leakage (fugitive emissions) could mean that US emissions are actually increasing YoY.
A study into American emissions from the natural gas industry. US natural gas consumption is rising at a terrifying rate to offset coal, but the environmental benefits of natural gas over coal are less tangible. Methane gas (CH4) is incredibly easy to leak and incredibly hard to deal with. In terms of CO2e, it is about 85x as potent over a 20-year period and 30x as potent over a 100-year period. Combustion of natural gas itself is estimated to release half the GHG of coal. So, what does that mean? Over a 20-year period, a leakage rate of 1.2% would put natural gas at GHG parity to coal. Over a 100-year period, that leakage rate goes up to about 3.3%. This is challenging because methane leaks everywhere: at extraction, during transportation, during processing, and at home... there is estimated to be a methane leak every 2 kilometers of pipeline.
So, how much methane leaks? The real answer is that we simply don't know. Previous EPA estimates vary widely, but it's widely accepted that we are undercounting it. Today, the EPA estimates leakage makes up 1.4% of total natural gas production. Researchers at Stanford estimate it to be about 9% over the Permian Basin. Researchers from Duke estimate that aggregate methane emissions from natural gas are 70% higher than EPA estimates. NOAA puts estimates of methane leakage over cities to be more than twice the EPA estimates. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates US methane leakage to be around 2.3%. The Atmospheric Fund estimates Canadian methane leakage to be around 2.7%. In fact, even the Congressional Research Service acknowledges that "the life-cycle GHG emissions of both existing and advanced natural-gas-fired technology may be comparable to coal-fired technology in the short term and could remain within range of coal-fired technology for several decades after emissions."
These numbers are terrifying. Over a 20-year period, we are absolutely fucked. Even using EPA numbers, the additional natural gas we burn today will have a greater impact on our climate in 2045 than if we had burned coal. So, let's take a look at
Figure 1: US energy production numbers
Total fossil fuel consumption is increasing. Coal is being replaced with natural gas, but total fossil fuel consumption is by no means contracting. Let's compare that with what the EPA reports for
Figure 2: US GHG emissions by sector
The EPA claims most GHG emissions reductions to be due to the electric power industry, which is reliant on switching from coal to natural gas. This is the key claim that the US uses to justify their aggregate GHGe reduction... but over what time frame? Over twenty years, we're at parity with coal even under the most optimistic estimates. Over a hundred years, we're at parity with coal under the leakage rate reported by most academic studies. Where is this GHGe reduction coming from and what time frame is it over? ****
yeah looking at the data idk what to do tbh
eh idk the collapse of imperialism might grab us a couple years
Enjoy the time we have left as much as possible, be kind to people, try to focus on what's important to you.
at this point I'm convinced they're going to let this go til everything is cooking and then nuke a volcano to instigate a volcanic winter