NEW STUDY MAY ANSWER LONG-STANDING QUESTIONS ABOUT ENIGMATIC LITTLE ICE AGEA new study led by scientists from the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado Boulder and Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland appears to answer contentious questions about the onset and cause of Earth's Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures that began after the Middle Ages and lasted into the late 19th century.(more) |
 The DOSECC GLAD-200 core rig at lake Hvítárvatn |
Today a paper entitled Intrusion triggering of the Eyjafjallajökull explosive eruption
is published in NATURE. Magmatic movements of the volcano have been measured in details with GPS geodesy
and satellite radar interferometry and interpreted in terms of magma movements in a complicated plumbing
system under the volcano. The results may provide general clues for how long-dormant volcanoes wake up and erupt,
with evolving magma intrusions eventually hitting pockets of magma residing in volcano roots triggering explosive eruptions.
The results are the outcome of collaborative research between University of Iceland, Delft University of Technology,
Netherlands, Icelandic Meteorological Office, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and University of Wisconsin- Madison, USA.
A Center of Excellence grant from the Icelandic Research fund
administered by RANNÍS amounting to 25 mkr. a year for 3 years will lay
the foundation for a new Center of Computational Science at the Science
Institute of the University of Iceland. The Center will establish a
stimulating environment for graduate student research and teaching in
computational science and will operate a 800 compute unit computer
cluster. Initially, a total of 15 graduate students and post-docs will be
working at the Center, in addition to the four principal
investigators: Hannes Jónsson and
Vidar Gudmundsson professors in the
Science Department of the University of Iceland and
Andrei Manolescu and
Sigurdur I. Erlingsson professors at the Reykjavík University.
(more)
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On September 29. september 2006
Kristín Ingólfsdóttir, rektor at the University of Iceland,
officially opens this center.
(some photos) |
| On September 22, 2006 Associate Professor Ari Ólafsson received the RANNÍS outreach award. For years Ari has been the department's most active member in outreach. He has held many courses and demonstrations for students and children of all ages. He is the driving force behind the "Experiment House", a project around the establishment of a science center, a place where the public can learn about physics and science through hands-on experience with experiments. |
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