Eyjafjallajökull

Where is Eyjafjallajökull?

Eyjafjallajökull is part of the Eyjafjöll, southern Iceland.

You will find it in: Iceland.

Summit: 63.620° N, 19.613° W

The story behind it

The name is three Icelandic words glued together: eyja (islands), fjalla (mountains) and jökull (glacier), so it is the glacier above the mountains that look out at the Westman Islands. It is hard for visitors to pronounce because Icelandic builds such long compound words and because the double l sounds roughly like a quick tl. Under the ice lies a crater three to four kilometres wide, open towards the north. The eruption of 2010 came in two parts: on 20 March a fissure opened at Fimmvörðuháls and poured out lava that people drove out to watch at night, and on 14 April the eruption moved to the crater under the ice cap. There the hot magma met meltwater, which shattered it into tiny sharp particles of volcanic glass that rose in a dark plume. Because such particles can harm jet engines, airspace over much of northwest Europe was closed from 15 to 21 April, affecting more than twenty countries and around ten million air travellers. Before that the volcano had last erupted from 1821 to 1823, so it takes its time; its ice cap covered about 66 square kilometres in 2019 and is shrinking.

Find it on the globe

Eyjafjallajökull is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.