As Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist at the University of Lancaster in the UK, pointed out in a statement, “not all dikes breach the surface to form eruptions … perhaps only one in every three or four.” There is still a possibility that the magma will not come to the surface at all. Iceland’s Blue Lagoon closed as 1,000 earthquakes hit in 24 hours “Everything depends upon where magma eventually reaches the surface, but the situation doesn’t look good for the residents of the town.” “The evacuated town of Grindavík is very close to the position of the new fracture, and its survival is far from assured,” he added. That particular eruption lasted several years, so this is a possibility,” he added.īill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, said in a statement that there “is no reason, currently, to think that this eruption will be especially big,” though he noted that “it is notoriously hard to forecast how big an eruption will be.” “If it erupts undersea, it could cause a Surtseyan eruption similar to the one that happened in 1963, also in Iceland, and created the island of Surtsey. “It could become explosive if the magma interacts with sea water,” Michele Paulatto, a research fellow at Imperial College London, said in a statement. If the magma erupts beneath the sea, it will be more explosive than if it erupts on land, experts say, though an eruption on land would be a greater threat to Grindavík itself. Magma is a mixture of molten and semi-molten rock beneath the surface of the Earth that can cause an eruption when it finds its way to the surface, becoming lava.Ī general view of damage due to volcanic activity at a golf course in Grindavík on Saturday. Iceland is facing events that its 360,000 residents “have not experienced before, at least not since the eruption in Vestmannaeyjar,” the country’s Civil Protection Agency said on Friday, referencing a 1973 eruption that began without warning and destroyed 400 homes.Ī 15-kilometer- (nine-mile-) long magma corridor now stretches from just northwest of Grindavík into the Atlantic Ocean, according to the Civil Protection Agency, which used models built from data collected in the area on Saturday. So, what do we know about this potential eruption, what are its risks, how could it affect travel and why is Iceland, an island of just 103,000 square kilometers (40,000 square miles), home to so much seismic activity? If there’s an eruption, the trench is designed to prevent lava reaching the power plant, causing outages and disruption, Bjarndal said.ĭespite the seismic activity in the volcanic region between Sundhnúkur and Grindavík decreasing, the IMO said Monday that the volcanic hazard assessment in the region remains unchanged. The power plant is located next to the Blue Lagoon, a popular tourist attraction. The Svartsengi Geothermal Power Plant provides electricity and geothermal water to heat houses to a population of 30,000 in the Reykjanes peninsula, city attorney for Reykjanesbaer Unnar Bjarndal said. Meanwhile, local authorities are preparing to build a protective trench around a geothermal power plant about six kilometers (four miles) from Grindavík, a spokesperson for Reykjanesbaer municipality told CNN on Tuesday. local time Tuesday, police announced they were closing the queue for cars to enter Grindavík, adding that “circumstances will be reevaluated tomorrow.” Scientists monitoring the situation, including those at the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO), observed changes to the situation on Sunday that could indicate “magma is moving closer to the surface,” and concluded on Monday that “the greatest area of magma upwelling” is in an area 3.5 kilometers (two miles) northeast of Grindavík.īut after allowing some residents to return to Grindavik to gather essential belongings on Monday and Tuesday, orders for evacuation have come again, this time “for security reasons.”Īccording to Iceland’s state broadcaster RUV, Tuesday’s evacuation order was due to “an increased SO2 value” detected by the Met Office’s gas meters, referring to increased levels of sulfur dioxide in the air.Īt 2:00 p.m. Iceland has declared a state of emergency and more than 3,000 residents have been urged to evacuate the small, coastal town of Grindavík as the country’s authorities anticipate the imminent eruption of a volcano in its southwestern peninsula.
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