Volcano Erupts Near Iceland’s Capital in a Seismic Area

Following days of increasing seismic activity in the region, a volcano has erupted on a mountain close to Iceland's capital Reykjavik, the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) said on Wednesday.

Local news organizations MBL and RUV captured images and live streams of lava and smoke erupting from a crack in the earth on the slope of the Fagradalsfjall mountain, which last year saw a six-month-long eruption.

Although there was no imminent risk of harm to vital infrastructure, tourists and locals should stay away from the region because of hazardous vapors, the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management advised in a statement.

Volcano eruption in Iceland

(Photo : Toby Elliott/Unsplash)

Despite helicopters being brought in to assess the situation, a "code red" was issued to prevent airplanes from flying over the scene, the IMO told Reuters.

According to a representative for the agency, the aviation warning would likely be dropped to orange, signaling less hazard, if the breakout was found to be comparable to the fissures reported last year.

The country's foreign ministry issued a statement saying that "at this time, there have been no delays to flights to or from Iceland and international flight routes remain available."

An earthquake and volcanic eruption occurred on the Reykjanes Peninsula, which is about 25 kilometers (15 miles) from Reykjavik and 15 kilometers from the country's international airport.

This eruption is not anticipated to release as much ash or smoke into the atmosphere as the one that occurred in 2010 on the ice-covered Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which grounded almost 100,000 flights and drove hundreds of Icelanders from their homes.

Iceland is positioned between two of the planet's main tectonic plates, the Eurasian and the North American, and as the two move in opposition to one another, Iceland regularly suffers earthquakes and has significant volcanic activity.

Also Read: White Island Disaster: Story Behind the Horrifying Volcanic Eruption That Killed 20 Tourists

Volcanic super-eruptions are millions of years in the making

Super-eruptions happen when enormous magma accumulations deep in the Earth's crust, created over millions of years, travel quickly to the surface shattering pre-existing rock, according to research from the University of Bristol and Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, as per ScienceDaily.

An international team of scientists was able to demonstrate, using a model for crustal flow, that pre-existing plutons-a body of intrusive rock made from solidified magma or lava-were formed over a few million years before four known enormous super-eruptions and that the disruption of these plutons by newly emplaced magmas occurred extremely quickly.

The magma disturbs the crust and subsequently erupts in just a few decades, as opposed to the magma supplying super-eruptions, which occur over a lengthy period.

The results, which were published today in Nature, explaining these dramatic disparities in time spans for magma creation and eruption by the flow of hot but solid crust in reaction to the magma's ascent, which accounts for the rarity of these eruptions and their enormous volumes.

Crystals created by earlier magma pulses, entrained within erupting magmas, are stored at temperatures near or below the solidus for long periods before the eruption and commonly have a very short residence in host magmas for just decadal timescales, according to Professor Steve Sparks of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences.

This study questions the theory that ancient crystals were stored for a long time at temperatures high enough to have some molten rocks present and shows that the crystals were from plutons that had already been emplaced and had fully hardened (granites).

Crystals from earlier rocks are ejected during volcanic super-eruptions, as scientists have long known.

Before the discovery, however, it was commonly believed that they had their beginnings in warm regions above the rock melting temperatures.

There is no logical explanation for the previous research findings that the magma chambers for super-eruptions form quickly.

Modeling showed that extremely prolonged periods of granite pluton emplacement in the upper crust would be required to precede super-volcanic eruptions, but there was no evidence to support this hypothesis.

Tags volcano, iceland