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A volcano that erupted in southwestern Iceland over the weekend sent lava pouring into a nearby fishing town, swallowing up roads and setting at least three houses alight, footage shared by national broadcaster RUV showed.
The volcano erupted around 8 a.m. local time Sunday after a series of earthquakes, the country’s meteorological office said. Molten rock from two nearby fissures streamed into the town of Grindavik, the agency said.
“Lava is flowing into Grindavik, a thriving town where people have built their lives,” Icelandic President Gudni Thorlacius Johannesson said in an address to the nation Sunday evening, describing “tremendous forces of nature” at play. It was the first time in more than 50 years that lava had flowed over Icelandic homes, he said.
Earlier Sunday, Johannesson said that the lava posed no threat to life in the town, which was evacuated over the weekend in anticipation of the eruption. According to Iceland’s metereological agency, one of the fissures cracked open the earth’s surface about 650 feet from the town, sending lava sliding over buildings and wreaking damage.
The eruption began on Iceland’s southern peninsula, near a separate eruption in Grindavik last month. Seismic activity in the Sunday eruption cracked the earth open and sent lava spewing into the air, exposing one fissure that authorities said measured at least 2,950 feet in length.
Photos taken from an Icelandic coast guard helicopter and shared by police officials showed lava flowing toward the town and lighting up the night sky before overcoming roads, machinery and buildings in its path. About an hour after the eruption began, lava had moved within 1,500 feet of Grindavik’s northernmost buildings, meteorological officials said.
Footage aired by RUV showed bubbling lava spewing smoke that filled the sky above the town. As the sun rose, photos from the helicopter showed glowing lava encroaching on the edge of the town’s built-up areas. Photos also showed construction workers racing to erect barriers in hopes of protecting the town from the flow, as lava breached a nearby road.
Despite significant damage, local officials said that the ongoing construction of anti-lava defensive barriers had protected the town. “Continuous work has been going on on the defensive wall to the west of the town,” Úlfar Lúðvíksson, South Iceland’s police chief, told RUV Monday. “We saw it yesterday and we see today that the defense wall that was built is very successful.”
Iceland’s meteorological agency reported that a fissure had cracked open the earth around 3,000 feet from the town, southeast of Hagafell mountain. The fissure straddled both sides of a defensive barrier that authorities were constructing to protect Grindavik from lava flows, officials said.
Around midday Sunday, the agency said an additional fissure had opened up even closer to the fishing town’s edge, beyond the defensive barrier. Officials said that an underground magma tunnel most likely extended beneath Grindavik but that seismic activity had stabilized.
According to the meteorological office, earthquakes shook the area starting around 3 a.m. Sunday. Officials said the level of seismic activity was comparable to that recorded ahead of the Dec. 18 eruption, although Sunday’s tremors were farther south. Police urged people not to approach the lava fountain on foot, warning that the ground was unstable and that cracks and gases posed dangerous risks.
Iceland volcano erupts after weeks of warnings and a town’s evacuation
On Saturday, Iceland’s civil protection agency said police began evacuating Grindavik residents as a temporary measure after a risk assessment found that the town was unsafe. Authorities said vacationers in the nearby Svartsengi area, where Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon is located, had been evacuated.
