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.
Via Middle East Spectator Telegram:
Lol 11 months ago: 'Israel' worries Iran could get Russian hypersonic missiles
2 months ago America's Hypersonic Missile Has Failed to Launch. Again.
Amerikkka is so cooked man how do we still not have hypersonic missiles???
Defense industry makes more money on fearmongering and grifting contracts vs actually making things.
critical support for defence industry for ruining american army
I'm sure pretty soon that EvilCorp is going to get a half trillion dollar contract to develop next-nextgen hypersonic missiles. The media led by ex-generals will make fun of critics. "The fun people are having on Twitter with the #HalfTrill boondoggle hashtag does not take into account that the project cost is over a 20 year span. It's a bargain in terms of cost effectiveness. Look, we need to compete against our advisories and enemies..."
And - of course - less than 10 years later the cost will have somehow ballooned up to $900 billion. Eventually the final cost will be estimated to be at least $1.5 trillion but who's counting? If it goes beyond $2 trillion which is four times the estimate it's still relatively speaking a bargain!
Trev years later 2.2 trillion has been spent and no actual working middle has yet come out of it but that is just how innovation works and eventually the 3.4 trillion project will actually produce a hypersonic missile. Each missile costs 4 billion dollars and it doesn't work in the dark or when it rains. However the 3.5 trillion was is well spent and production of the missiles creates jobs in Bumfuck Alabama that happens to lie in the district of senator Holden Bloodfeast whose vote was crucial to get the 3.9 trillion project approved.
Senator Holden Bloodfeast complains to the media "This project produced 100,000 jobs in my state. I'm proud of the work I did. And here's the thing it moves real, real fast and it ain't always dark or rainin'. Once they get it to wor— Once they get it in operation - it can fly at Mark 40. That's like 1,000 times the speed of an airliner plane..."
is there any way Iran has nukes?
I guess it's not technically impossible but I very much doubt it. They'd likely have to do nuclear testing and that can be detected seismically pretty easily.
ultimately if Iran wants nuclear protection then they'll have to go ask Putin really nicely and hope he says yes
oh myyyyyy goooooood
I did a quick wikipedia look at how scramjet technology works, and it's supposedly only able to fly in the atmoshpere, since it requires compressing atmospheic oxygen for ignition, but this missile, according to the claim, has exo-atmospheric maneuvering. How the hell does it work?!
Theres a paywalled WSJ article out there that shows it taking a high arc at first before dropping low and flying flatter. Scramjets need initial propulasion from something else to work, so it likely uses rocket propulsion initially -- Maybe this is an exo-atmospheric phase during which it can reorient before it uses atmospheric reentry to speed back up. And the range of this thing means they figured out how to keep it cool enough during high-hypersonic flight no not destroy itself, which I guess is an issue very fast things tend to have.
I really wanna know how this thing works
Lmao, US can't even inovate propulsion tech anynore