Hekla
Hekla (Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈhɛʰkla]), or Hecla, is a stratovolcano in the south of Iceland with a height of 1,491 metres (4,892 ft). Hekla is one of Iceland's most active volcanoes; over 20 eruptions have occurred in and around the volcano since 874. During the Middle Ages, Europeans called the volcano the "Gateway to Hell".
Hekla is part of a volcanic ridge, 40 kilometres (25 mi) long. The most active part of this ridge, a fissure about 5.5 km (3.4 mi) long named Heklugjá, is considered to be the volcano Hekla proper. Hekla looks rather like an overturned boat, with its keel being a series of craters, two of which are generally the most active.
The volcano's frequent large eruptions have covered much of Iceland with tephra and these layers can be used to date eruptions of Iceland's other volcanos. 10% of the tephra created in Iceland in the last thousand years has come from Hekla, amounting to 5 km3. The volcano has produced one of the largest volumes of lava of any in the world in the last millennium, around 8 km3.
Scotia (barque)
Scotia was a barque that was built in 1872 as the Norwegian whaler Hekla. She was purchased in 1902 by William Spiers Bruce and refitted as a research vessel for use by the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition. After the expedition, she served as a sealer, patrol vessel and collier. She was destroyed by fire in January 1916.
Description
The ship was 139 feet 6 inches (42.52 m), with a beam of 28 feet 9 inches (8.76 m). She had a draught of 15 feet 6 inches (4.72 m). The ship was assessed at 375 GRT.
History
Hekla was built as a barque in 1872 by Jørgensen & Knudsen, Drammen for S. S. Svendsen of Sandefjord. She was used as a sealer, making voyages to the east coast of Greenland from 1872–82 and to Scoresby Sound in 1892. In 1896, she was sold to N. Bugge, Tønsberg. She was sold in 1898 to A/S Sæl- og Hvalfangerskib Hekla, Christiania and was placed under the management of M. C. Tvethe. Hekla was sold in 1900 to A/S Hecla, Sandefjord, operated under the management of Anders Marcussen.
Hekla 3 eruption
The Hekla 3 eruption (H-3) circa 1000 BCE is considered the most severe eruption of Hekla during the Holocene. It threw about 7.3 km3 of volcanic rock into the atmosphere, placing its Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) at 5. This would have cooled temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for several years afterwards.
An eighteen-year span of global cooling is recorded in Irish bog oaks that has been attributed to H-3. The eruption is detectable in Greenland ice-cores, the bristlecone pine sequence, and the Irish oak sequence of extremely narrow growth rings. Andy Baker's team of researchers dated it to 1021 BCE ±130–100.
A "high chronology" (earlier) interpretation of the above results is preferred by Baker, based also on growth of stalagmites. In Sutherland, northwest Scotland, a spurt of four years of doubled annual luminescent growth banding of calcite in a stalagmite is datable to 1135 BCE ±130.
A rival, "low-chronology" interpretation of the eruption has been made by Andrew Dugmore: 2879 BP (929 BCE ±34). In 1999, Dugmore suggested a non-volcanic explanation for the Scottish results. In 2000 skepticism concerning conclusions about connecting Hekla 3 and Hekla 4 (probably 2310 BCE ±20) with paleoenvironmental events and archaeologically attested abandonment of settlement sites in northern Scotland was expressed by John P. Grattan and David D. Gilbertson. Some Egyptologists have firmly dated the eruption to 1159 BCE, and blamed it for famines under Ramesses III during the wider Bronze Age collapse. Dugmore has rebutted this dating. Other scholars have held off on this dispute, preferring the neutral and vague "3000 BP".
