Iceland Volcano Erupts Close to Grindavik After Weeks of Earthquakes

REYKJAVIK — A volcano in southwestern Iceland, the nation’s most populated area, started erupting Monday with lava fountains reaching excessive within the air and the glow lighting up the sky miles away within the heart of the capital, Reykjavik.

The situation of the fissure, which is a few 2.5 miles lengthy and rising shortly, isn’t removed from the Svartsengi Energy Plant and the city of Grindavík, which was evacuated final month due to heightened seismic exercise, resulting in issues than an eruption was probably.

Within the preliminary evaluation Monday evening, volcanologists had stated that the eruption had occurred in one of many worst attainable places, posing a big and rapid menace to each the evacuated city and the geothermal energy plant.

However after volcanologists had an opportunity to fly over the positioning of the eruption within the Reykjanes Peninsula, the rapid state of affairs didn’t seem as dire as initially feared, although the scale of the eruption was bigger than anticipated and the route of the lava’s stream nonetheless unpredictable.

“This is larger than previous eruptions on Reykjanes,” Magnus Gudmundsson, a volcanologist and among the many first individuals to view the eruption from the air, instructed The New York Occasions.

Lava is at the moment flowing simply 2.5 kilometers north of Grindavík, or 1.6 miles, in line with Kristín Jonsdottir, the top of the volcanic exercise division on the Icelandic Meteorological Workplace.

Nevertheless giant the eruption, with the city of Grindavík evacuated, it at the moment poses no danger to individuals, a police official, Ulfar Ludviksson, instructed reporters.

Nonetheless, the authorities had been cautioning individuals to not get too shut. Hjordis Gudmundsdottir, a spokeswoman for the Division of Civil Safety, urged individuals to avoid the realm, emphasizing this was “no tourist volcano.”

“The fissure size is expanding fast,” she stated in an interview.

Whereas an eruption had been anticipated for weeks, following a sequence of earthquakes, Monday’s eruption got here with none rapid advance warning. The Blue Lagoon, one in every of Iceland’s high vacationer locations and positioned close by, had reopened for visitors on Sunday as concern that an eruption was imminent had diminished.

Hundreds of earthquakes had been detected in Iceland since late October, in line with the Icelandic Meteorological Workplace. In November, with properties and roads being broken, the authorities declared a state of emergency and evacuated Grindavik, a city of greater than 3,000 individuals close to the volcano.

The nation has seen this earlier than, loads.

In simply the previous two years, there have been 4 eruptions on the Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland’s most populated nook and residential to its capital. When Grindavik was ordered evacuated on Nov. 11, the authorities stated in an announcement that the nation was “highly prepared for such events.”

“Iceland has one of the world’s most effective volcanic preparedness measures,” it stated on its web site.

The authorities raised the aviation alert to orange, as a result of a volcanic eruption might pose a danger to plane flying within the North Atlantic if ash spewed into the sky.

However as of Monday evening, Iceland’s primary airport, Keflavik, remained open, with this eruption not producing flight-stopping ash.

One of the vital memorable eruptions in Iceland’s current previous concerned the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in 2010. Whereas that eruption was comparatively small and precipitated no fatalities, the affect was widespread as a result of a ensuing ash cloud grounded much of Europe’s air travel for greater than per week.

The Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced EYE-a-fyat-la-jo-kutl) volcano had been dormant for practically two centuries earlier than it sprang again to life greater than 13 years in the past.

Iceland has a number of volcanoes.

Volcanic eruptions are not uncommon in Iceland, which has fewer than 400,000 residents and about 130 volcanoes. Because the nineteenth century, not a decade has passed by with out one, Iceland’s vacationer web site tells guests. The prevalence of eruptions stays “entirely random.”

The nation straddles two tectonic plates, that are themselves divided by an undersea mountain chain that oozes molten scorching rock, or magma.

The present seismic exercise has not affected one in every of Iceland’s best-known volcanoes, Katla, which some scientists fear is due for an eruption. Katla has erupted 5 instances since 1721, at intervals starting from 34 to 78 years. The final main one was in 1918.