Iceland Volcano Update as Livestreams Show Lava Bursting From Ground

The volcanic eruption on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula has now reached the fishing town of Grindavík, engulfing houses in flames.

Livestream videos from the area show lava spurting out from a fissure in the ground, surrounded by a blanket of black, cooled lava. Other webcam angles show smoke pouring from the scorched region.

The volcano started erupting just north of Grindavík in December last year, but several new lava fissures opened up near houses in the town early on Sunday morning, some of which have burned to the ground as a result of the intense heat.

Luckily, Grindavík had been evacuated on Saturday because of mounting fears of a new eruption. The 4,000 residents had previously been evacuated from their homes in November before the volcano started erupting around 2.5 miles away.

"A new eruptive fissure opened at 12:10 this afternoon, just north of the town. Lava flows extruded from this fissure have now entered the town," the Icelandic Meteorological Office said in an update on Sunday.

Defenses made of rock had been constructed near the town in December, which helped stem some of the lava flowing toward the houses, but many of these were breached, with several houses in the town burning down.

"Lava temperatures vary. Basaltic lava such as that erupting near Grindavik is typically 1,100 to 1,200 degrees Celsius," Rachel Beane, a professor of natural sciences at Bowdoin College, told Newsweek. "As that is much higher than the temperature at which wood ignites, the danger is high for homes and other buildings catching fire."

"I don't think it's possible to imagine anything worse than it erupting in a settlement and lava flowing onto houses," Benedikt Halldórsson, a seismic hazards coordinator with the Icelandic Met Office, told Iceland's national broadcaster RUV.

The eruption came as the 9-mile underground river of magma running across the peninsula started moving closer to the surface near to the town, leading the IMO to warn on January 9 that another eruption may be imminent. Lava began to spill out early on Sunday as a new fissure burst open right next to Grindavík.

"Fissures have opened sequentially along the boundary between the North American and Eurasian plates. These give access to the surface for magma that would otherwise solidify at depth. So it's not really the magma moving, or even the source of the magma that's moved: it's just that the magma's access to the surface depends on where the fissures open," David Rothery, a professor of planetary geosciences at the Open University, told Newsweek.

Nobody has been hurt in the recent eruption, though a man named as Lúðvík Pétursson fell into a crack in the ground that opened up after last month's volcanic eruption.

A search for Pétursson, who had been working to fill cracks in the ground formed by the volcanic activity, has now been called off.

"What we all hoped would not happen has come to pass," Icelandic President Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson said in a national address. "We shall continue to hold those in our thoughts who have not been able to live in their own homes, those who have had to watch the lava flow through and around their community."

The eruption is the second on the Reykjanes peninsula in the past month, and the fifth since 2021.

The slow ooze of this eruption differs to more explosive eruptions that have been seen at other volcanoes, such as Mount St. Helens in Washington. This is mainly due to differences in the type of magma in different regions.

"Magma composition is the major determinant for the type of eruption," Beane explained. "The magma near Grindavik is low-silica basalt that flows readily and tends to erupt lava through fissures and vents. This magma forms through partial melting of the Earth's mantle and is common in oceanic-rift zones such as Iceland and the rest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Mt. St. Helens is a cone-shaped stratovolcano that has erupted a variety of magmas including basalt as well as higher silica andesite and dacite."

"Magmas with higher concentrations of silica are more viscous (resist flow) and tend to erupt more explosively with abundant tephra (hot solid fragments) such as ash. These more explosive eruptions are more common from stratovolcanoes that overly subduction zones (where two tectonic plates converge) such as along western North America where Mt. St. Helens is located as well as the western coast of South America, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Japan," Beane said.

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Update 1/17/24, 11:59 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comments from Rachel Beane and David Rothery.