Braided motivations for Iceland’s first wave of mass emigration to North America after the 1875 Askja eruption
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract More than 14,000 Icelanders emigrated to North America between 1870 and 1914 CE. Mass movement from Iceland accelerated the year after the explosive eruption of Askja in 1875, and both contemporary and recent commentators have linked the two circumstances. Despite an abundant scholarship on Icelandic emigration in this period, the direct and indirect roles of the eruption as a possible stimulus remain unclear. Here, we engage critically with a range of contemporary source materials as well as meteorological and climatological information to re-assess where Askja fits into the picture of Iceland’s first wave of mass migration. We find that emigration was undoubtedly fuelled by the hardships of Icelanders and their growing contacts with countrymen already in the Americas, and that the highest proportions of emigrants came from counties most directly impacted by the Askja eruption. However, it also emerges that the eruption served as a lever for interested parties in Britain and Canada to persuade large numbers of desirable migrants to settle in North America. Our study highlights the opportunities that discrete episodes of volcanic activity present to probe the complex interrelationships of nature and society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".