Good news: Iceland is having another eruption! Better news: at time of writing, it’s flowing away from major infrastructure like Grindavik, the Blue Lagoon and the Svartsengi geothermal power station! After all the rumblings and theories of the last three months or so, it seems to have popped up in the best possible place of all the options it’s offered up.
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Bad news: you’ve got a new Icelandic name to learn. Sundhnúkagígar. Sund = apparently means swimming, hnúka is a peak or possibly peaks plural (my Icelandic can manage some nouns but I haven’t got onto plurals) and gígar is crater/s. Swimming peaks craters. Seems odd to me but I’m limited to Google Translate (and at least I know enough Icelandic to recognise it as three words in a trenchcoat and not to accept the translation “swimming pool humps”). Sund can also mean a channel, alley or lane and that makes a little more sense in the context of craters between or behind two mountains, as it appears to be on the map.
It started at 10:17pm yesterday, Monday evening, with a single explosion captured on webcam (see below) and within two hours had formed a fissure some 3km long, a little way north of Grindavik. By the time I was up and squealing over it all, it was up to 4km long but by lunchtime, it was estimated to be only about 500m long. I say “formed”. It’s torn open an existing fissure from many thousands of years ago, a weak point in the area where it’s presumably easiest. Believe it or not, lava just wants an easy life. If you look closely at the fissure, the middle of it is a zigzag but it’s only opened on the zigs, not on the zags, so it’s a slightly incomplete and broken line at moment.
Byrjunin á eldgosinu á vefmyndavél RÚV yfir Grindavík
0:13 pic.twitter.com/Jx3icbxuxx
— Birkir (@birkirh) December 18, 2023
Obviously, a certain amount of alarm greeted the eruption but it does seem to be in a hilly area where the lava is naturally funnelled north, away from the town and the Blue Lagoon. The Blue Lagoon, incidentally, only reopened on Sunday at 11am after being closed for over a month and then, less than 48 hours later, it’s closed again because there’s a volcano virtually on the other side of the road.
It started with spectacular fire fountains, the like of which apparently haven’t been seen since the Holuhraun eruption of 2014 – you may not know about that one because a) it happened in a remote area that tourists had very little hope of getting to b) it happened in late August and ran through to February which is inaccessible winter in that part of the country. It produced some amazing fire fountains and rivers of lava. Sundhnúkagígar has already died down quite a bit – I’m starting to wonder if it’ll still be going this time tomorrow – but we know from previous eruptions that its early hours are usually the most spectacular, when the pressure under the ground is at its highest. People were saying that it’s ten times the size of the eruptions we’ve seen in 2021, 22 and this summer. It’s certainly very visible from a long way away. Even from Reykjavik, more than 20 miles away, it looks like a bonfire in the back garden.
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Practicalities: well, Grindavik was evacuated over a month ago. There are neither humans nor animals in the area. As activity has quietened down, there was some hope of returning by Christmas and… well, I don’t know what’s going to happen. They’d have been evacuated last night anyway, what with the volcano being so close. At the moment, the lava is flowing away from Grindavik and we hope that’ll continue. But I guess you just don’t know what it’ll do next and I think I’d like to not be living there right now.
Reykjavik and Keflavik Airport are not affected. Reykjavik is twenty miles away and Keflavik is ten miles away. The lava isn’t going to reach either and there’s no ash from this one, just fire and lava. No danger. However, the only road on the entire peninsula open at the moment is the 41, the main road that runs from the airport to the capital. You can’t get at Grindavik via the south coast road, the 427, nor via the road that runs form the airport to the town via the end of the peninsula, the 425, and the road that runs south from the 41 to Grindavik, the 43. For the last two days, that road has been open to buses going to the Blue Lagoon. Not cars, because of construction work to build a protective barrier between the power station and the area where they were expecting an eruption. That road will now be closed to all but the professionals who need to be there. Your flight won’t be affected by the eruption but you may have trouble on the 41 if it gets jammed by would-be volcano tourists who aren’t allowed to turn left onto the 43. There’s no way around it. You can’t skip the queues by taking the southern roads around the peninsula because they’ve been closed for weeks. And the police will be manning the roadblocks.
Yes, they’re explicitly asking people not to visit right now. For one thing, it’s so new and fresh that the authorities haven’t had a chance to look at it in daylight, let alone make any decisions about it. Second, there’s no access because of the aforementioned closed roads. Third, there’s no assigned parking place or walking route yet. Give them a chance! They will make it, not because they want you to come but because making it as safe as possible to get there means that ICE-SAR theoretically has less work to do rescuing the idiots who set out unprepared into a random patch of mountain. With an official route, even one they don’t want you on, they at least know where to find you when you get into trouble. Fourth, this is Icelandic winter. Daylight is limited to about four hours a day and there’s thick snow on the ground. Even in good weather, which is far from guaranteed, and even if the official route is very short and nearby, that’s still incredibly risky conditions to go out hiking in. Sure, you’re an experienced hiker with the correct equipment and you know how to use it. But tourists, on the whole, are not experienced and correct. I’m more experienced than many people I know and I absolutely wouldn’t be heading out into the snow with sunset only two or three hours away. ICE-SAR, Icelandic Search & Rescue (all volunteers, let me remind you) have got better things to do right now than rescue idiot tourists.
Maybe in the coming days or weeks, the authorities will decide that it’s safe if you’re well-equipped, know what you’re doing and stick to the marked route. But that route doesn’t exist yet and it’s such early hours that it’s impossible for decisions to be made just yet.
If you want to follow along online, there are plenty of people who are either on the scene or who know what’s happening. These are my favourites. They’re a mix of official sources, scientists and photographers, so there’s a mix of “PRETTY!!” and “this is what’s actually happening” and “this is why this is happening”.
Official:
Icelandic Met Office
RUV (Icelandic news) English
Twitter (I have these people on a List which I can then view as a tab, my own personalised volcano feed!):
Dr. Evgenia Ilyinskaya
Dr. Thorbjorg Agustsdottir
Dr Robin George Andrews
Icevolcanx
Lava Centre Hvolsvollur
Hugh Tuffen
Birkir
Hörður Kristleifsson
Dr Rebecca Williams