Main road to Grindavík (Iceland) is covered under lava

Finally got them potholes filled.

that's iceland. they don't have potholes, because none of their streets get very old, see exhibit A

Boss, you'll never guess why I can't make it today.

A bunch of my co-workers are situated in Iceland and, you joke, but they have had to leave the office twice because of risk of lava in about a year.

Which seems like a startlingly high number
- "Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice"
  
  What do you even do if your office gets burned and melted by a volcano? Do you take a week "off" and all meet up in a new space? Do you look for a new job? Like damn, if the warehouse I work in burned down I'd be completely out of a job unless I can move 1,000 miles away.
- Well when you live on a volcanic island… it shouldn’t be that surprising that it occasionally does volcano things
- I like how calmly Icelandic civilians and government workers seem to be coping. I know there are only about 300,000 of them, but they get repeated emergency advisories out faster than one warning would get out in, for example, Oklahoma USA. Anybody who wants to be near Hot Flowy Death right now WANTS to be near it. Source: every time the good citizens of a county in Oklahoma are warned about a (water mixed with trees) flood, there's always THAT GUY who says the county didn't do enough to warn HIM and that's why XYZ happened.
In Iceland it's a commonly accepted reason to stay home. Volcano-leave, we call it.
- Do you guys have a 16 letter word for it that sounds like a Klingon trying to speak French?
- Cool, a close second place to my favourite of being bitten by a scorpion
You're fired. lol.

Mother nature is scary AF

Do you dig it out or just go over top with new road it's gotta be pretty effed up underneath all that, before chiseling through it and clearing it off, and where do you go with the slag if you do dig it out? Do you treat it like snow?

Bro that's the new Iceland, anything underneath has been Pompeii'd
- This is worse than Pompeii. The ancient Roman city wasn't buried under lava, but under ash, rock and boulders. While that is still very deadly, it isn't nearly as destructive as lava. That's why we can still experience Pompeii architecture, art and culture. Excavating this road, covered in solidified lava, is extremely difficult and costly. Just go over it, once it's cooled.
- Missed opportunity. We could have messed with the future.
They did that in Hawaii decades ago when Kīlauea covered Chain of Craters road and others.

Kīlauea said “Fuck that” and covered the roads again and again, along with entire neighborhoods. The Hawaiians just let it all go back to nature now. You can drive roughly 10 miles of Chain of Craters Road now, which is in Volcanoes National Park, until it ends very much like the road in this picture.

Speaking of Kīlauea, you might be interested in reading about Jacks Lava House which survived for years as the entire neighborhood around it was reclaimed by the volcano. It was eventually reclaimed by Kīlauea as well about a decade ago.
- I was feeling really bad for the guy thinking he was now homeless, because there would've been no way to sell the home prior being in the location it was, until I read the last lines of him living at his second home while he figures out what to do. Oh gee, I don't know. How about, live in your spare home? For fucks sake "figuring out what to do". Collect any reimbursement and move on in your extra house as if nothing happened. Rich motherfucker. There are few enough houses available in Hawaii without someone taking up multiple. No wonder Hawaiians are sick of haoli.
  
  My rants aside though neat links! Thanks for posting them!
Just paint a yellow line and call it a day.
On that note of a million questions, the soil looks pretty soily; How long would it take that new lava rock to become as soily on top?
- I looked it up and unsurprisingly there's a whole Wikipedia page about this. Long story short, it takes decades for rock to become soily at all so likely a much longer time till it becomes as soily as what's around it here.
- In Iceland it’s pretty cold a lot of the year - not insanely, but colder than a lot of plants prefer. So the rock to soil conversion happens via moss.
  
  While on tour there last year, our guide pointed out the ages of certain lava fields, and he noted that the existing lava fields around Grindavik were between 700 and 1300 years old. My photos from the area show that they’re about 60-70% rock, with moss covering the rest. I suspect if you scraped away the moss, you’ll find slightly crumbly rock underneath (But don’t do that - do not mess with the moss in iceland). I’m not sure how long it takes for the lava to be converted into soil, but I would guess it’s more on the scale of multiple thousands of years.
  
  This page (up until the waterfall) has some good photos of a few lava fields and gives dates for the eruptions that created them. Meandering Wild - Lava and Moss
  (The photos are at the bottom of each blurb, not the top - so Eldhraun is the one with the rounded rocks and moss at 350 years old, and not the black rocks, and Dimmuborgir, at 2300 years old, is the one with the treetops shown below the craggy rocks.)
  
  Another banger from our tour guide was that (according to him) the locals say if you get lost in an Icelandic forest, just stand up. Which is… sorta true. They only tree of real quantity there is birch, and the tallest birch I saw was about 16ish feet (5ish meters). They do not grow heavily, so they’re a bit comedic and stringy. Decades old stands of them sort of look like 1-2 year old stands planted in warmer climates - without any ground cover, of course, because while grass will grow, the usual complement of weeds, vines, and what-not does not.
Breathe, son.
where do you go with the slag

You sell it as decorative lava rock.
Looks like they would need to bulldoze it level and I assume add some fill dirt to even out the grade, I don't know how many winters such a road would last though.

I like the way there's a police car there, in case people were thinking they might just go for it anyway

You clearly don't know people
- "It's rock, right?"
- Today, someone jumped over the construction barriers on an escalator that was under construction. They fell into the open hole in the escalator, got seriously hurt, and then had the audacity to complain to metro police officers that there was a hole in the escalator for some reason. The police had the grace to not admonish him for being a moron. Both ends were blocked with construction barriers ~4.5 feet high by 3.5 feet deep, and the elevator was right by them, lol. It was very difficult for someone to even vault over in the first place.
Imagine this would happen in the US! The police would have shot the lava!

EDIT: For the Downvoters: Of course they would have shot the lava. Have you seen it? Its black!
I visited Iceland, not too long ago. The tour guides, politely, made a point of illustrating how much of a rude menace tourists can be with their rental cars. We got a pass, of course, as we were on a tour bus every time this happened. The message was clear: use the world-class public transit and charter busses/tours where possible.

My perspective as a tourist: the cops really are needed in situations like this.
- People who make money by shepherding people on buses are fans of bus travel.
  
  Huh.
- World class public transit? Lol you can hardly get from the airport to Reykjavik, you absolutely need a rental car if you want to enjoy Iceland
  
  Iceland is actually one of the most car dependant countries in the entire world
Jeep Owners have entered the chat
- ԀՈ ƎᗡIS SIHꞱ
- Hah! What gets used for real there would have Jeep owners drooling with envy.
- I saw a Juck with the doors taken off the other day.
  
  Like a pidgeon wearing floaties.

Tone-deaf bosses be like, "actually we have a return to office mandate.. We're gonna need a note from your doctor."

"I don't understand why turnover is so high. Ever since COVID people just don't have any work ethic. The lockdowns really destroyed our economy in irreparable ways. Wait no, don't quit."
- The "people don't want to work anymore" rallying cry has always confused me. Who ever wanted to work in the first place?
We're gonna need a note from your volcanologist.

I bet a Cybertruck couldn't make it, prove me wrong.

I’m not even sure they can sell Cybertruck in Iceland. Most developed countries have pedestrian safety standards that the Cybertruck can’t pass.
- They cannot.
  
  EU safety rules specifically forbid sharp edges (kudos to the visionary who thought about including that one...).
  
  Additionally, it's weight is absolutely ridiculous, to the point that you cannot drive it with a standard B licence (you need at least C1, which requires specific classes and written + driving exams).
  
  Not to mention, many streets simply cannot accommodate a car so large, and there's zero parking space for such a monstrosity in most city centers...
  
  Edit: actually I'm not sure if Iceland included these specific EU rules, so maybe they can actually sell it there?...
- Off-roading in Iceland is strictly forbidden.
Saw my first cybertruck in person while on the highway today. It was pretty funny looking. Also, I doubt many vehicles were created to ride lava; let alone uneven terrain to this degree.
- The Cybertruck was literally advertised as able to drive on Mars.
- I also recently saw my first in person. It is bigger than I expected and looks really stupid.

You still come in to work tomorrow, right?

Yes sir! Will bring some lava with me 😂😂😂
- Yeah grab yourself a couple buckets full and just blot out the rest with several stacks of gravel :D

Earth: "Oh you want to pave things? Let me help"

Accompanying IKEA to arrive shortly.

To anyone acquantinced with Iceland: What kind of logistical issues does this actually provoke? What measures do you typically (or exceptionally) take to make sure that no location runs unsupplied for too long?

I'm not the kind of person you wanted a response from since I know absolutely nothing, but I would imagine being an island, boats play a big role in keeping supply lines running.
I’ve been there on tour once, and I just looked at an online map to make sure I didn’t misremember. I also follow a guy on YouTube that talks about geology and has been focused on Iceland lately, so I think that makes me a complete expert.

Joking aside, the road to Grindavik is sort of out of the way, but it is the connector road between the south coast and the airport, so it’s like a 45 minute diversion to get to the airport from the south coast (and vice versa). And like an hour+ diversion if you’re going from the south coast to the Blue Lagoon/the geothermal power/hot water plant that provides power and heat to the airport and (I think) most of Reykjavik.
Unfortunately the power plant/Blue Lagoon is very close to the fissure, and it’s possible a future larger lava flow could damage them. (It is expected more fissures/flows will occur, but the location and size are unknown.) I’m sure both the civil engineering and tourism folks are working on spinning up alternative sites.

Grindavik, for what it’s worth, keeps bouncing between being evacuated and residents griping so much they get let back in. The Icelandic government has an offer on the table to purchase people’s homes in the town, so they move out. I think the plan is probably to abandon the town, since it’s possible this eruptive period could last hundreds of years. (Or not! We have no idea, really, just past data and informed guesses.)
- I'll have you know, I have pretty high standards to consider someone an expert.
  
  I’ve been there on tour once, and I just looked at an online map to make sure I didn’t misremember. I also follow a guy on YouTube that talks about geology and has been focused on Iceland lately, so I think that makes me a complete expert.
  
  Oh, no! You're meeting all of them!
Basically everyone gets evacuated from the affected area and are staying with friends and family in Reykjavík. Grindavík is a very small town compared to the rest of the world. The government has offered to buy properties from the ones who cannot return, since the erruptions have been going for a few years in that area and there's no sign of stopping.

To answer your question for the rescuers, researchers, and workers left in the area, once the eruption starts it's quite easy to predict the flow. Luckily there are a few other roads without the risk of lava flow, mainly due to lava diverting barricades. In case of emergencies they use helicopters.

Other parts in eruption risk zones would be similar, since it's just not worth it for people to stay in those areas and most people can stay with family. And repairs to the road are usually pretty quick when the eruption dies down.
- But what if I sit outside my house with a garden hose as the lava comes for it?
Not Icelandic, but I've been following the situation closely.

This is an evolving issue. Grindavik, the town on the far side of this has been severely damaged by earthquakes and is currently surrounded by a berm that's (mostly) holding the lava flow back. The Svartsengi power plant is likewise protected by a berm and has had the pipes supplying hot water to Reikiavik damaged and repaired.

Geologist Sean Willsey has been providing outstanding coverage on the subject.
I'm guessing driving the other way around would help and boats. But I'm not an expert.
- The ring road around the country is about 1300km, so it's clearly a pretty big hassle, but not a complete disaster, unless the entire area around the main intersection is blocked.

Sorry, but no compassion from me: shouldn't have built the road right under a lava stream. Stupid decision, really.

Wonder if you could drive on that obsidian, or is it too hot/sharp for any vehicle to drive over that area.

Obsidian forms when lava cools very rapidly, limiting crystal growth. The lava pictured above most likely cooled slowly.
- Cool. I guess I used lava and obsidian as synonyms.
- Obsidian is stone glass?
Too hot, but every other time this has happened in the last several months, they've been able to spread dirt and gravel on top to make a temporary road.
After some time, you can. But it's going to be molten underneath the crispy exterior for a while. You're going to need some beefy 20 ply off-road tires so they don't immediately get sliced open.

I want to go to Iceland because I hear it's awesome plus I like the added danger it might blow up at any moment.

It's also fun how massively expensive it is. And their currency makes it feel even more expensive. Want a loaf of bread that'll be 23,000 krona.

But it's got hot spring and a surprisingly vibrant nightlife so it's all worth it.
- Wasn't that expensive when I went last year, actually felt relatively affordable. Actually, all of Europe felt affordable compared to food prices in the US...
- 1 EUR = 149.307 ISK. I highly doubt a loaf of bread to be 154 EUR

"When I was your age I had to walk to school through 5kms of lava, just to avoid fighting with bears again, it was actually faster if I ran" just kidding I know we don't have money to raise children anymore

Okay, this is my next digital painting attempt reference no doubt. The composition is great out of the box. Easy textures, palette

Is this normal in Iceland? What's the current situation there?

Edit: Found Details link

Edit2: looks like the town was evacuated

It happens. Times past they’ve used buckets of seawater to save villages from encroaching lava. Icelanders are built different.
- Well back in the 1990s, Tommy Lee Jones and the LAFD used jersey barriers, fire trucks, and knocked a building over to stop a lava flow from demolishing the west side of Los Angeles, so I'd say we're pretty impressive too.
- Icelandic people meeting god before time started.
  
  God: y'all want to die in fire or ice?
  
  Icelandic people: yes
I follow a guy on YT (An American geology professor) who is pretty into this situation. One of his viewers is a superfan and lived in Grindavik, giving him on the ground updates.

This eruption is expected to be part of a periodic cycle of increased activity that could last hundreds of years.

In a recent-ish video, he said the Icelandic government was offering to buy the home of anyone who wanted to sell in Grindavik, and that his superfan’s house had been purchased by the government.
I think the long term plan is probably to abandon the town.

Looks like a challenge for Cybertruck owners, who would be gullible enough to think their “futuristic” truck probably could drive across that.

It looks like ocean

Like the ice oceans in the Mars trilogy
- Ahhhh, the books that I bought and never read because I don't read anymore. :(

Someone explain to me why we need AI to come up with cool things for us to look at...

We haven't created real life catgirls yet
- Pff. Andrew Lloyd Weber did that back in 1981.
  
  Good thing no one ever made a movie of that, am I right?

The road is lava

I think we need more photos from the #Iceland.

Minor inconvenience

Skill issue
probably impedes adults as well.

Metal as fuck

This reminds me on the movie "The Thirteenth Floor".

Yep, they're not getting that back.

I mean if they just wait a bit they are one road grinder away from a new road.

It's been raining more than average here... So yeah. Same difference?

Picture reminds me of East Cleveland (not to be confused with the east side of Cleveland; "East Cleveland" is it's own city. The roads are this bad but I'm sure anyone who could fix the roads are too scared to go there...

Also looks like Detroit after some rain. The right lanes literally flood.

Midwest needs a redesign.

They're not scared, the city simply doesn't have the money. I've seen the fire department filling potholes. Euclid ave has been fixed up. Terrace has been blocked off, I used to see cars driving on the sidewalk to avoid the pot holes
- I'm just poking fun of the reputation it has. I hear crazy rumors about East Cleveland from "mayor stole all the funds" and it's normal to find human remains in your yard. Mind you, I also live in the urban Midwest, it's just East Cleveland seems next level bad.
  
  I have noticied South Euclid is getting nicer. NE Ohio has potential, it's just so resource starved.

Reminds me of the black liquid in Death Stranding

Death Stranding's environment was directly inspired by Iceland, after all

gild fjarvera frá vinnu!

HOT LAVA! LAVA!

That's what insanity prawn boy says

Why don't they just move the infrastructure away from the volcano? Are they stupid?

You mean toward the other volcanoes?

My biggest question is, why haven't they changed their turn name to Grimdark - I mean it's right there - and will they do so now?