Volcanic eruption disrupts Icelandic settlements

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A fissure eruption in southern Iceland blanketed pasturelands with choking tephra and poisoned the thin grass that sustained livestock across a wide swathe of the island's most productive farmland. The eruption forced the seasonal migration of entire farming communities and severely strained the limited resources of a Norse island society that lived always at the precarious edge of subsistence, one bad summer from catastrophe.