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The consequences of this summer's weather have included droughts, heatwaves and wildfires, straining the society's capacity to cope with such perils. Most of the Nordic and Baltic countries have experienced the hottest summer on record, while the number of days with rain in parts of Iceland was exceptionally high. Was this summer just an exceptional freak event or is this due to climate change? And if this is due to climate change – what can be done?

The first hazardous weather of this autumn is expected later this week which is unusually early this year. Strong northern winds are forecast from Wednesday until early Saturday morning. Precipitation associated with this weather will mostly fall on the northern part of the country in the form of rain, sleet or snow. At any point during this bad weather sleet or snowfall can be expected down to sea level.

On the 13^th of September at 20:17, two earthquakes of magnitude around M4 occurred, only 5 seconds apart, 6 km south of Bláfjöll mountains. Several smaller aftershocks were recorded. The earthquakes were felt widely in the capital area, and also in Ölfus and Akranes. The earthquakes are located on the tectonic plate boundary that lies eastwards along the Reykjanes peninsula where earthquakes of magnitude around M6 can occur.

The jökulhlaup peaked at Sveinstindur at around 00:00 UTC on 5 August, having reached a discharge of approximately 2,000 cubic metres per second. In terms of discharge, the August jökulhlaup is one of the larger floods to have affected Skaftá in recent decades. However, with a maximum discharge of 3,000 cubic metres per second, the October 2015 jökulhlaup remains the largest and most damaging flood to have affected Skaftá since the mid-1950s.

Sentinel-1 satellite radar images show displacement in the starting area before July 7th, when the landslide occurred according to InSAR analysis by Vincent Drouin at the University of Iceland and the National Land Survey of Iceland. The mountainside in the starting area of the landslide is different from the surrounding slopes according to an interferometric analysis of the radar images. The displacement in the last days before the landslide was at least a few centimetres. The starting area also appears to have been moving in 2017, 2016, and 2015 but at a slower rate.