Iceland rocked by its fourth eruption in a few months
POLICE in Iceland declared a state of emergency after lava began spewing from a new volcanic fissure on the Reykjanes peninsula on Saturday night.
Hundreds of guests at the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa resort were forced to flee after the violent eruption lit up the night sky with jets of orange lava. The eruption is the fourth in three months and follows weeks of warnings from the Met Office that magma was accumulating under the ground.
It opened a fissure almost two miles long between Stóra-skógfell and Hagafell mountains on the Reykjanes peninsula.
Bjarney Annelsdóttir, a senior police officer, told state broadcaster RÚV that about 700 people had been in the Blue Lagoon when the eruption began.
The eruption site is near Grindavik, a coastal town of 3,800 people about 30 miles southwest of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik. Mr Annelsdóttir said there were very few people still in Grindavik since an evacuated last November when the Svartsengi volcanic system awakened after almost 800 years.
The volcano eventually erupted on Dec 18. A second eruption that began on Jan 14 sent lava toward the town. Defensive walls that had been bolstered after the first eruption stopped some of the flow but several buildings were consumed by the lava. A third eruption began Feb 8. It petered out within hours, but not before a river of lava engulfed a pipeline, cutting off heat and hot water to thousands of people.
RUV quoted geophysicist Magnús Tumi Guðmundsson as saying that the latest eruption is the most powerful so far. The Met Office said some of the lava was flowing towards the defensive barriers around Grindavik.