
and "shitting themselves" are prufocks words, not my own. my original post referenced early research and how geologists were worried that it could develop into a major and continual hazard. if you recall how recent eruptions have disrupted european aviation, the possibility of it developing into a regularly erupting shield volcano that sends ash clouds 8 km up into the troposphere seemed like a reasonable concern. So far it seems to be following that development path, as the above article confirms, but there's still a lot of unknowns.
( , Tue 8 Jun 2021, 0:44, Reply)

"the possibility of it developing into a regularly erupting shield volcano that sends ash clouds 8 km up into the troposphere"
That would seem scary, if that's what shield volcanoes do. They don't. You're thinking of cinder cone volcanoes.
Shield volcanoes just sit there like fat lumps oozing their contents out onto the surface (insert "your mum" joke here). They're about the most benign volcanoes you'll ever see. Mauna Kea is a classic shield volcano, and hasn't released an eruption column in forever. The worst that does is force the occasional road to be rebuilt somewhere else.
Source: My geology degree.
( , Tue 8 Jun 2021, 16:52, Reply)

as unlike the mixed partial melting of the majority of other icelandic volcanoes, this one seem to be sourced from down at the mantle boundary, possibly as an old pathway that hadn't been used for 14,000 year was reopened by a recent earthquake. So when you have varying mg mafic minerals, as stated, you have varying viscosities, and hence varying sorts of eruptions. The one characteristic of these deep sourced volcanoes is that they tend to be long lasting and bring up lots of rock, some erupting for thousands of years, so in this context I think they were talking about shield volcanoes in terms of prominence, as they are some of the largest volcanoes on earth. shield is more of a morphological descriptor, some are quite pyroclastic, or have suffered cone collapse. And even volcanoes like mauna kea and loa are in what's called their post shield phase, they had substantial large pyroclastic eruptions in their earlier phases, with large ash deposits like the pahala ash layers showing they blew their tops as good as the next volcano
( , Wed 9 Jun 2021, 0:09, Reply)