Volcanic Eruption Begins Again in Iceland, Met Office Says
A fissure opened up in the ground at 3:54 a.m. on Wednesday, the Met Office said on its website. Lava is flowing southeast from a fissure of about 700 meters (800 yards) and no infrastructure is threatened this time, the authorities said.
Iceland's southwestern corner has experienced repeated lava bursts since awakening from an 800-year dormancy in 2021. This volcanic event is the ninth since December 2023 when eruptions began on the doorstep of a small fishing town, Grindavik, forcing Iceland to relocate most of the townsfolk who make about 1% of the country's population.
'It's lucky because the eruption is in the most remote part of the area,' Armann Hoskuldsson, volcanologist at the University of Iceland, said by phone. 'We are watching the evolution of the eruption.'
Fissure eruptions have tended to cause no harm to air travel.
One of the most disruptive geological events in Iceland's recent history happened in 2010 when volcano Eyjafjallajokull in the southern part of the country experienced an explosive eruption. That released a plume of ash so vast that it grounded air traffic across Europe for weeks, resulting in the cancellation of 100,000 flights and affecting over 10 million people.
Iceland is one of the world's volcanic hot spots due to its position on the mid-Atlantic ridge where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates rift apart. Scientists have warned that a new era of activity has started on the Reykjanes peninsula.
The pace of outbursts since 2021 is 'unusual but not unprecedented,' Hoskuldsson said. His base case remains that small-scale eruptions continue also going forward.
(Updates with comments from a volcanologist from fourth paragraph.)
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