Emergency declared after Iceland’s fourth volcano eruption since December
Icelandic police declared a state of emergency after lava began spewing from a new volcanic fissure on the Reykjanes peninsula on Saturday night.
Hundreds of guests staying at Iceland’s famous geothermal spa resort – the Blue Lagoon – were forced to evacuate after the violent eruption lit up the night sky with jets of orange lava.
The eruption on Saturday evening was the fourth eruption in three months and follows weeks of warnings from the Met Office that magma was accumulating under the ground, making an eruption likely.
It opened a fissure in the earth 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.
A statement from the Blue Lagoon company on Saturday evening said its “facilities were temporarily closed” due to the eruption.
The eruption site is near Grindavik, a coastal town of 3,800 people about 30 miles southwest of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, that was evacuated before the initial eruption in December.
Mr Annelsdóttir said there were very few people in Grindavik when the eruption occurred.
Grindavik was evacuated in November when the Svartsengi volcanic system awakened after almost 800 years with a series of earthquakes that opened large cracks in the ground north of the town.
The volcano eventually erupted on Dec 18, sending lava flowing away from Grindavik. 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.
Both eruptions lasted only a matter of days. 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.
Iceland, which sits above a volcanic hot spot in the North Atlantic, sees regular eruptions and is highly experienced at dealing with them. The most disruptive in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge clouds of ash into the atmosphere and led to widespread airspace closures over Europe.
No confirmed deaths have been reported from any of the recent eruptions, but a workman was declared missing after falling into a fissure opened by the volcano.
