On the North Atlantic island of Iceland, glowing red lava is once again bubbling out of the ground. During the third volcanic eruption in the third year in a row, a hundreds of meters long fissure opened near the capital Reykjavik, from which the liquid rock emerges to the surface. After a strong start to the eruption, activity decreased quite significantly on Tuesday, as shown by live footage from the volcanic area on southwest Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. In the afternoon, thick plumes of smoke could be seen rising from the lava surface.
“It has now evolved into a weak eruption, which is very good news,” said leading geophysicist Magnús Tumi Gudmundsson on Icelandic broadcaster RÚV. The crack in the earth has shortened considerably and the flow of lava has decreased, as has the development of gas. Fortunately, the eruption is not developing as it looked in the first few hours. “This is a much more philanthropic outbreak,” Gudmundsson said.
Watch the video: Iceland – first earthquake then volcanic eruption near Reykjavik.
The state weather authority Vedurstofa came to a similar assessment. The lava emerges from several vents in the fissure, but the activity of the eruption has decreased significantly since it began, she said in the early afternoon. Even if it was a “relatively small eruption”, measuring instruments would show considerable activity. Deformations have been measured over the entire underground magma tunnel – it cannot therefore be ruled out that a new vent will form elsewhere.
Like previous eruptions in the area, the eruption announced itself in August 2022 and before that in March 2021 with thousands of earthquakes, some of them strong. Later on Monday afternoon, the Vedurstofa finally reported that the eruption had started around 4:40 p.m. in the immediate vicinity of the Litli-Hrútur mountain. On the night of Tuesday, the authorities spoke of a 900-meter-long chasm and lava flowing much faster than in the previous eruptions in the area.
The eruption does not look like what you would imagine a classic volcanic eruption to be: Instead of a massive lava flow shooting up from a cone-shaped volcano, the glowing hot lava bubbled out of a long crack in the earth. This type of eruption is also known as a fissure eruption. It usually does not lead to large explosions or huge columns of ash. The volcanic area is about 40 kilometers southwest of Reykjavik. Live recordings and drone images showed another spectacular natural spectacle: glowing red lava flows meandered through the moss-covered landscape. This spectacle could again attract numerous scientists and onlookers in the coming time. The eruptions of 2021 and 2022 had already attracted volcanologists and thousands upon thousands of hikers and tourists. However, due to the strong formation of gas, among other things, the meteorological authority and the Icelandic government initially advised against going to the area.
How long the spectacle can be seen this time was initially unclear. “We have no idea how long this eruption will last and how it will behave exactly,” said volcano expert Gudmundsson. In all likelihood it will not be large, but it may well last a long time. The eruption in 2021 lasted a good six months, in summer 2022 only a few weeks.
While Reykjavik is the main metropolitan area of the North Atlantic island with its almost 390,000 inhabitants, relatively few people live on the Reykjanes Peninsula. The risk to residential areas and vital infrastructure was considered low. There have also been no disruptions to air traffic so far. In the spring of 2010, things looked very different: the eruption of the difficult-to-pronounce volcanic glacier Eyjafjallajökull catapulted international air traffic into chaos for days – and distant Iceland suddenly made the international front pages.
