Fourth Columnist: Almost Time To Embrace The Horror...

We're in a weird kind of Monbiot territory here....Good science versus bad journalism as opposed to George's own excellent journalism fighting the ludicrously bad science that abounds. The bad journalism this time revolves around the sensationalist speculation that Mount Hekla is about to blow! The "Shock! Horror!" of the uninformed hacks is but a neutrino compared to the actuality of the volcano's potential to destroy everything as we know it; up to and including George Osborne's misplaced public optimism on the UK economy and Nicolas Sarkozy's ego, along with, of course, all life.

So here's some bad science and worse hackery but all in the interests of illumination:

Hekla is a relatively small hill, really. No more than five thousand feet above the sea that it would cause to rise or simply immolate. It has grown a few feet during 2011 as the magma it encases struggles to reach the surface. Imagine, if you can, Pierce Brosnan and Tommy Lee Jones in an amalgam of their entertaining but silly movies "Dante's Peak" and the eponymous "Volcano"; then multiply the dramatic, cinematic horror by several thousand and the on-screen body count by several million and you might get some way to appreciating the impact of a Hekla's worst-case.

It might be a smallish hill, but Hekla is also a stratovolcano of the kind often found in subduction areas of the planet where tectonic plates crash about on the unstable crust. On more occasions than not, the stratovolcano impact is localised due to the make-up of the igneous outpourings failing to travel very far from the caldera...typically only a matter of a few miles. This can be nonetheless devastating if the volcano is near to population centres such as Vesuvius' destricution of Pompeii and Herculaneum around 79 CE. With the greatest respect to Icelanders, Hekla's potential for devastation through lava and pyroclastic flows is probably minimal in the great scheme of things. However, regardless of the histrionics of some hacks, Hekla has the potential to become a ELE (Extinction Level Event) if all of the wrong circumstances pervade. The magma build up could be massive and there is the chance of a Mount St Helensesque scenario and worse. Depending on prevailing atmospheric conditions, a startovolcano can shoot particulates up through the stratosphere where sulphur dioxide may readily form sulphuric acid clouds weighing millions of tons and effectively stopping sunlight from reaching the troposhphere, thus reducing global temperatures and possibly leading to a semi-permanent winter, global crop and livestock failures and the associated cataclysmic effects that will, ultimately, cause the extinction of almost all life on Earth.

Merry Christmas, then, everyone...