Sleepless Icelanders yawn in the face of volcano’s dramatic lava explosion

WHEN the Fagradalsfjall volcano finally began spewing lava in spectacular fashion on Friday night you could be excused for thinking the people of nearby Grindavik may have panicked.

But to most in the sleepy fishing town just outside the Icelandic capital, the rupture was just another of the 40,000 tremors that have kept them awake for weeks. “Everyone’s pretty much walking around like zombies. We were waking up like four or five times per night, or maybe waking up at four o’clock and not being able to fall asleep again,” primary school teacher Rannveig Gudmundsdottir said.

“Some children were calm, some scared, some just tired all the time,” she said of the weeks of extreme seismic activity. What has been keeping everyone awake on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula is a huge pool of magma moving nearly a mile beneath the surface of the peninsula, pushing up and trying to break through.

On Friday, just before 9pm, it did so, with the Icelandic Met Office posting an extraordinary picture of streams of lava flowing from a 500m long fissure, about five miles north-east of the town, sending a deep red glow into the sky.

Unlike the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010, which grounded 900,000 flights, the Met Office does not expect huge clouds of ash or a need for mass evacuations. Instead, they expect dramatic lava fountains.

Since last Sunday, when a major earthquake shook the town, seismic activity had fallen, with only 400 earthquakes on Thursday.

In the weeks before that, though, there had been more than 40,000 earthquakes. “Some children just went somewhere else with their parents for a few days to get a break from the earth moving,” Ms Gudmundsdottir said. As well as the sleeplessness, residents have been suffering from stress, headaches, back pain, and motion sickness.

“Some people don’t feel a thing, and some people just feel it a lot,” she said.

There has been a similar spread of reactions among the pupils.“Some are afraid, but some find it pretty cool that it’s happening, that maybe we could get an eruption in our backyard.”

And on Friday night, it happened.