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Comment by jsm386 | Hacker News Reader

Do you really want to build your data center on top of 130 volcanoes?

The island has about 130 volcanic mountains, of which 18 have erupted since the settlement of Iceland. Over the past 500 years, Iceland's volcanoes have erupted a third of the total global lava output. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanism_of_Iceland

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True, but you've gotta figure that "our datacenter was swallowed by a volcanic eruption" is at least a cooler excuse than "DFW is having weird power issues". If you must go dark, go dark in style! (And keep a good eye some off-site backups).

They also have a lot of earthquakes.

But then, Japan has lots of earthquakes and quite a bit of storms and rain and people still live there. There are also regular devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean and the south-east USA and people also still live there!

Isn't the San Francisco area prone to earthquakes too?

Yes, big fat ones.

I am glad Europe is as boring as it is.

I'm thinking this is going to be more for "batch compute" type operations where you'd probably have data replicated across multiple sites and the latency won't impact the job significantly.

I was thinking of shared hosting for all those little web sites too. They must add up to a lot of power/cooling

The volcanic nature of Iceland can also be seen in Þingvellir, where the North American and Eurasian continental plates can be seen as a canyon.

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Iceland_Mid-...

I can't recall ever hearing about a volcano on Iceland threatening people, though.

The earthquakes are probably a bigger problem, since they affect a larger area don't all occur in specific locations. Design the building properly and even that shouldn't be a big problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldfell

5,300 had to be evacuated from the island of Heimaey due to an eruption in 1973.

In 1783 the Laki volcano killed about a quarter of the Icelandic population, due to both poisoning and an ensuing famine. That volcano also appeared to have global climate effects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki

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