Volcano erupts again on Iceland peninsula

REYKJAVIK: Police in Iceland declared a state of emergency on Saturday as lava spewed from a new volcanic fissure on the Reykjanes peninsula, the fourth eruption to occur in the area since December.

A “volcanic eruption has started between stora Skogfell and Hagafell on the Reykjanes Peninsula,” said a statement from the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO). Live video images showed glowing lava and billowing smoke.

The Nordic country’s Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management announced it had sent a helicopter to narrow down the exact location of the new fissure. It also said the police had declared a state of emergency due to the eruption.

The IMO said the latest eruption occurred close to the same location as a previous one on February 8. Lava appeared to flow south toward the dykes built to protect the Grindavik fishing village, it added.

Just after 10 p.m. (local time), “the southern lava front was just 200 meters from the barriers on the eastern side of Grindavik and moving at a rate of about one [kilometer] per hour,” the weather agency said.

Lava was also flowing west, as it had on February 8, and the length of the fissure was estimated to be 2.9 km (1.8 miles), it added.

“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,” the IMO said, stressing the assessment was based on the first hour of “eruptive activity.”

Minutes before the eruption, the agency had issued a statement saying seismic activity indicated that there was an increased chance of an eruption.

“The preeruptive warning phase was very short,” it said.

On Friday, the IMO said 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 added.

Local media reported that Grindavik and Iceland’s famed Blue Lagoon geothermal spa had been evacuated.

The roughly 4,000 residents of the village were only cleared to return to their homes on February 19 after having been evacuated on November 11, though only around a hundred 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 December 18 that spared the village.

But 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 the February 8 eruption.

As of Friday, more than 300 of Grindavik’s inhabitants had put in requests to sell their house to the state.

The eruptions on the Reykjanes 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.

Iceland is home to 33 active volcano systems, the highest number in Europe.

It straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a crack in the ocean floor separating the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.

But until March 2021, the Reykjanes had not experienced an eruption for eight centuries.

Further eruptions occurred in August 2022 and in July and December 2023, leading volcanologists to say it was probably the start of a new era of seismic activity in the region.