A new volcano erupted on the Reykjanes Peninsula in southwestern Iceland late on Thursday, spewing lava into the air in the sixth eruption to hit the region since December last year, authorities said.
Live video images showed orange lava bursting out of a long fissure, illuminating the billowing smoke rising up into the night sky.
“A volcanic eruption has begun. A fissure has opened east of Sylingarfell,” the Icelandic Meteorological Office said in a statement, adding that the eruption had started at 9:26pm following a series of earthquakes.
Photo: AP
The office initially estimated the length of the fissure at 1.4km, adding in a later statement that it had extended to 3.9km in 40 minutes.
There was still “considerable seismic activity” at the northern end of the fissure more than an hour after the start of the eruption, it added.
An earthquake measuring 4 on the Richter scale was recorded at 10:37pm, the office said.
Photo: AFP / Public Defense Department of the State Police in Iceland
Dozens of people could be seen parked on the side of the main road from the capital, Reykjavik, to Iceland’s Keflavik airport to watch the eruption, a correspondent at the scene said.
Iceland’s national airport and air navigation service provider Isavia said in a statement that “flights to and from Iceland are operating normally despite the ongoing eruption.”
This eruption comes just two months after the end of a previous eruption that lasted more than three weeks.
Sudurnes Chief of Police Ulfar Ludviksson told Icelandic media that an evacuation of the nearby village of Grindavik was going well.
Ludviksson added that 22 or 23 houses in the village were occupied.
Most of Grindavik’s 4,000 residents had evacuated in November last year, prior an eruption the following month, and while residents have since been allowed to return in between eruptions, only a few have opted to stay overnight.
Speaking to Icelandic public broadcaster RUV, Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson, a professor of geophysics at the University of Iceland, said that unlike previous eruptions, there was little activity on the fissure’s southern end — the direction of Grindavik.
“So if this continues as expected, there is no lava flowing near Grindavik. I think we have to consider it good news,” Gudmundsson said.
However, the “night is young and we must continue to monitor this,” she said, adding that in general “it’s a more favorable position than the last time.”
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
RSS