Today I needed to go to Húsavík to take water samples. The person who does this usually is on a summer vacation which is quite all right but because of the earthquakes in Bárðarbunga volcano we decided it was important to have a sample for this week.
There is a formula that describes how far from an earthquake of a given magnitude we could expect to see sustained changes in groundwater (Wang & Manga, 2010). When the earthquake sequence began in Bárðarbunga I calculated how big they needed to be to affect our research area. The picture here shows my calculations for earthquakes over M 5 and from it we can see that a M 5.3 earthquake could affect our station at Hafralækjarskóli HA-01 and a M 5.7 earthquake has an affected area north to Grímsey and to southwest to the geothermal area at Hellisheiði.
It is therefore extremely important for us now that our water sampling is in good shape and hopefully we can learn something new from these volcanic type earthquakes in Bárðarbunaga.