Icelandic police on Saturday declared a state of emergency as lava spewed from a new volcanic fissure on the Reykjanes Peninsula, the fourth eruption to hit the area since December last year.
A “volcanic eruption has started between stora Skogfell and Hagafell on the Reykjanes Peninsula,” the Icelandic Met Office (IMO) said in a statement.
Live video images showed glowing lava and billowing smoke.
Photo: AFP / Handout / Icelandic Coast Guard
The Icelandic Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management said it had sent a helicopter to narrow down the exact location of the new fissure and that police had declared a state of emergency due to the eruption.
It close to the same location as a previous eruption on Feb. 8, the IMO said.
Lava appeared to flow south toward the dykes built to protect the fishing village Grindavik, it said.
Just after 10pm, “the southern lava front was just 200m from the barriers on the eastern side of Grindavik,” the IMO said, adding that it was moving at about 1kph.
Lava was also flowing west, as it did on Feb. 8, and the length of the fissure was estimated to be 2.9km, it said.
“From initial assessments of Web camera imagery and aerial photographs from the helicopter flight, the eruption is thought to be the largest [in terms of magma discharge] of the three previous fissure eruptions from the Sundhnukur crater row,” IMO said, adding that the assessment was based only on the first hour of “eruptive activity.”
Minutes before the eruption, the agency had issued a statement saying that seismic activity indicated that there was an increased chance of an eruption.
“The pre-eruptive warning phase was very short,” the IMO said.
On Friday, the IMO said that magma was accumulating under the ground in the area “which could end with a new magma intrusion and possibly an eruption.”
That could happen “with very little warning,” it said.
Iceland’s famed Blue Lagoon geothermal spa had been evacuated, as well as Grindavik, local media reported.
The roughly 4,000 residents of Grindavik were only cleared to return to their homes on Feb. 19 after having been evacuated on Nov. 11, although only about 100 chose to do so.
On that occasion, hundreds of tremors damaged buildings and opened up huge cracks in roads.
The quakes were followed by a volcanic fissure on Dec. 18 that spared the village.
However, a fissure opened right on the town’s edge in January, sending lava flowing into the streets and reducing three homes to ashes, followed by a third eruption near the village on Feb. 8.
The eruptions on the Reykjanes Peninsula have also raised fears for the Svartsengi power plant, which supplies electricity and water to about 30,000 people on the peninsula.
The plant was evacuated and has been run remotely since the first eruption in the region, and dykes have been built to protect it.
Until March 2021, the Reykjanes peninsula had not experienced an eruption for eight centuries.
Leading volcanologists say it is probably the start of a new era of seismic activity in the region.
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