I don’t live there any more but my family does. I visited last November during the major seismic activity and the town was evacuated. My family found a safe harbor at our extended family in a nearby town (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38225019).
One local “correction” from most media (including the Icelandic media). The mountain (or hill rather) closest to the eruption is actually called Svartsengi by the locals, but Sýlingafell on maps. Svartsengi is actually the field down the hill behind the camera. They used to hold boxing matches and festivals there in the 50s and 70s respectively. Svartsengi is also the name of the nearby power plant (even though it is actually closer to Baðsvellir). If we want to be explicit we use a definite article Svartsengið to mean the field Svartsengisfell to mean the hill and Hitaveitan to mean the power plant. Sýlingafell is never used.
The fissure is still growing and is about 4 km now, and I’ve been following along the national radio RÚV[1]. There is a map of the fissure and the live stream angles there[2] (hopefully the link works). Based on it looks like the southern reach is near Gálgaklettar (N 63° 52' 4", W 22° 24' 20") and the northern reach is passed Stóra Skógarfell (N 63° 53' 53", W 22° 21' 39").
Words that are worthy of reading both for their extremely vivid and personal description of something that, from our vantage point, happened a very long time ago, and for their eloquence.
> At the moment it doesn't look like flight traffic will be affected.
Yes, in fact the opposite. Air traffic controllers in Iceland were planning a strike, and they've now postponed it because of the eruption, they claim.
I am in Iceland now. The ATC strike has been in the morning, delaying flights 4-5 hours but not cancelling them. Flights are still coming in and out today. Last night another guest at our hotel saw the eruption from the plane.
It's so amazing that we can just immediately have a bunch of live feeds and easily scroll back on them to see the moment the eruption occurred. "What a time to be alive" vibes.
Thank RÚV, the Icelandic national broadcaster, which setup cameras weeks ago and has been live streaming the area since then for capturing the eruption.
I live in Reykjavik, west side and close to the ocean. From the coast line there it is about 35km or 22 miles direct line of sight to the eruption site. I went out about 1 hour and 15 minutes after the eruption started and saw the lava flow about 100-150m in the air with my bare eyes. I've seen a few eruptions but they are always mesmerizing!
Ha, we might be neighbors. I took a pretty similar picture from Sörlaskjól. I just happened to be chilling for the evening when I saw the red glow on the horizon and snapped a picture just as it started going up: https://imgur.com/xLZqcqO
It's so interesting to see things like this and imagine what peoples of times past would have thought about when first discovering such sights and sites! Or even imagine yourself seeing this thousands of years past with no idea of what or why it was happening.
No need to guess. There is almost a thousand year old story in Iceland which describes such a thing in Brennunjálssaga. The story goes something along the lines that they were discussing whether to adopt Christianity at the Parliament. but as they were debating somebody told them that a new eruption had started. Some assembly members wanted to blame this on the debate, that the gods were insulted that they were considering being abandoned, however others argued: “Then what angered the gods that produced the lave which we stand on now?”
In short, people kind of knew what was going on. They may not have known the exact mechanism, but they did know that this was how land formed, and was a normal part of nature, just like the northern lights, earthquakes and rain.
So funny you should mention this! I am almost finished re-reading one of my childhood favorite comics, Rahan [1] , where authors imagined live in prehistoric times, and where almost one third of the albums bring up the topic, one way or another, attempting to imagine what kind of feelings and beliefs such events induced.
I'm always taken aback by the beauty and brightness of a lava flow. It's pitch black outside, but it's almost easy to forget that, given how brightly everything is lit up.
Is it normal for there to be such a long (4km!) fissure with lava erupting? I always was under the impression a pit formed and then filled with lava which would then overflow out the sides, rather than a long rip in the earth like this.
Good observation. I think this would be highly uncommon anywhere else in the world (at this length) but it's normal for Iceland.
The reason is that Iceland's vulcanism is driven by a hot spot that sits right on top of the middle oceanic ridge (where tectonic plates emerge from the mantle, as opposed to coastal subduction zones where they travel back into the mantle).
The ridge is normally on the seafloor and this is one of the very few places where it runs on land. This makes Iceland's volcanism so special and specifically interesting for science.
Iceland sits on top of the Mid Atlantic Ridge where the continental plates are being pushed apart. More common volcanoes are associated with subduction zones where plates collide.
They have a very slight semblance of control over the lava, in the sense that they have built some berms in an attempt to protect important infrastructure (power plant and town) should the lava flow towards it.
But ya, mostly they have the people evacuated and taken care of.
looks like it's blown is major load and its over pressure has scaled back. This looks much more promising in terms of being able to manage the occurrence
Interesting there are a Lots of Iceland posts on hacker news. Im guessing tons of tech people from all over the world have visited and fell in love with Iceland too!
Though heads up going there to see the northern lights is all about luck unless you stay for weeks to months. Be cool see the lights and this active volcano in the opposite direction of each other :)
The aurora is very active this year. We’ve seen it in twice in six days. Friends saw it the first night. Iceland Met has an Aurora forecast based n solar conditions and cloud cover
The eruption appears to have calmed way down (flow down by a factor of 4), and they're saying Grindavík appears to not be in danger, with the lava being erupted north of the topographic dividing line where it would flow to the town.
Did this happen right underneath the town? Is the town okay?
IIRC, I remember news some weeks back that a fissure was opening in the town roads and steam was billowing up from it. Did the volcano literally sprout from the town center?
The currently erupting fissures are something like 2.5 to 6 km north of the town. The town is fine*, so far, but there's obvious concern about where the lava is going to travel.
* Evacuated, and some structural damage from pre-eruption earthquakes and earth movements like the fissure you mention
I saw that the Blue Lagoon just reopened yesterday. Does the eruption mean that it will close again or does it mean they don't have to worry about it erupting right at the spa?
It is most definitely closed. The only people in that area now are construction workers who are closing the gap between the two mountains Þorbjörn and Hagafell, in order to protect the power station.
They're closing the barricade where the road intersects it. The northern intersection seems to be a priority rather than the southern one, like I thought first.
The fissure length at its maximum is thought to be around 4km in length, about 2.5 miles. The output has diminshed and the webcam is zoomed in on the most active part right now, which is probably not more than a few hundred meters.
Only if magma starts erupting in the ocean, then it will make significant amounts of ash. It doesn't appear to be making large amounts of ash now, and I think the general consensus is it will not.
Not really. While there's danger to local infrustructure, this area & eruption is more likely to remain a (series of) ground lava flows, without explosive ejection of ash to high altitudes, at high volumes – as would be required to significantly disrupt air traffic.
Not a volcanologist but I have been following this for awhile. My answer is no. The only chance of something like that happen is if the eruption moves under the sea. This particular hot spot is very reluctant to under sea eruptions. During magma intrusion the dyke extended a lot and reached passed the town and beneath the sea floor, so was a very slim chance of an under sea eruption for a minute there. However the dyke stopped extending soon there after and has since solidified in any under sea portions of it.
I was there Friday. So upset I missed this. I went in 2021 to see the eruption that went on for months. It stopped the night before I went to the crater and picked back to shortly after I left Iceland...
If you scrub back to 22:17:15 (on the embedded video clocks), you can see the initial eruption caught.
At a time like 00:12:26, you can see the camera with the best view rattle as if by a quake – which then appears in the quake log, lower-right.