1500 year old Eyjafjallajökull tephra

I´m off in to the field to track down the Layer H tephra (sometimes called E500) from Eyjafjallajökull. This is preliminary fieldwork for a new project trying to find out more about this prehistoric eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, in collaboration with Andrew Dugmore, Anthony Newton, Thorvaldur Thordarsson at the University of Edinburgh and Guðrún Larsen at University of Iceland.

So, after this fieldwork and a bit of lab work and analyses we should be able to:

• make an isopach map
• calculate deposit density and produce an isomass map
• estimate deposit volume and mass
• carry out grain size analyses of tephra samples
• estimate total grain size distribution from the deposit
• assess the size and explosivity of the eruption

We already have quite a lot of thickness data from my PhD research and Andy Dugmore´s decades of research in this area and good geochemical data so this new fieldwork and sample collection campaign will help us fill out some of the gaps in geographical coverage that we have just now and all us to make some interesting comparisons between this prehistoric eruption and the more recent eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull. Exciting stuff!!

Here´s hoping for good weather and some soils where I want to find them.