@slick: 360K people live there. It’s been lived in by human beings since about the year 900.
I read the NYTimes articles. This eruption is not such a bad problem; but when this volcano erupts, a bigger one called Katla has always erupted next, and Katla is a big deal. When Katla erupted in l784 or something like that, almost everyone in Iceland died – you can’t breathe the air, your house is covered in lava or is flooded out because the glaciers on top of the volcanoes melt from the sudden heat and the water sweeps out to sea taking your house with it, and your animals die from breathing in the ash. Worse than that, for those of us, like you @slick, who believe Icelanders don’t really count, the sun was blotted out for a couple of years, enough that people all over Europe and Russia starved to death because there was no summer, therefore no food was grown.
And when Pinatubo, a volcano in Indonesia, erupted in the l9th century, the ash cloud made the following winter so cold that the Misssissippi froze as far south as New Orleans.
Let’s have a little respect.