What’s this?:

The mouth of Hell? No, it’s an overhead radar image of the Icelandic volcano now ruining air travel in Europe. As blogger Stein Sigurddson writes of this anthropomorphic image, “The mind does some great interpolative associative processing ;-)”
Be that as it may, a friend asked me at lunch today if it seemed weird that there was so much seismic activity around the globe this year. I agreed that it did seem like this has been an unusually active seismic year, but we couldn’t decide if we were just paying more attention to earthquakes and volcanos this year, or if it really has been extra busy under the earth’s surface. It’s possible that we are seeing a pattern and imposing meaning on it where one doesn’t exist — like seeing a face in the Icelandic volcano, for example.
Does anybody know? If this has been an unusually active seismic year, what does that signal about the future? I’m asking a scientific question, in part because I see that there’s a new report out estimating that a major Vesuvius eruption would kill 8,000 people and cause $24 billion in damage — and Sicily’s Mt. Etna is rumbling again. What precipitates periods of intense seismic activity? Or is it always constant, on the whole (by which I mean, does a period of calm in one part of the world mean that it will be active in another?). But if you have any far-out New Age or religious prophecies to link to, let us have ’em.