REYKJAVIK — Icelandic authorities announced Friday that a second fissure has formed in the southwestern part of the Reykjanes peninsula. The sixth lava begins to erupt. I’ve been in the area since December. After weeks of warnings, the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) announced Thursday that a new eruption began that night at 9:26 p.m. (5:26 p.m. ET) after a series of earthquakes.
Video showed orange lava erupting from a long fissure, which IMO estimated to be 3.4 miles long.
Early Friday morning, IMO announced on social media that a second fissure had opened north of the original fissure, but said volcanic activity remained primarily in the first fissure.
The Japan Meteorological Agency, which also monitors geological phenomena, previously reported that there was “significant seismic activity” at the northern end of the fissure.
Almanna Varna Deirdo/Anadolu via Getty
About an hour after the eruption began, a magnitude 4.1 earthquake was recorded in the area.
This is the sixth eruption to hit the region since December, and comes just two months after the previous eruption ended, which lasted more than three weeks.
Sudurnes region police chief Ulfur Ludvigsson told Icelandic media that the evacuation of the nearby fishing village of Grindavik was proceeding smoothly.
He added that 22 to 23 houses in the village are currently occupied. Most of Grindavik’s 4,000 inhabitants had evacuated Eruptions occurred in November before the December eruption, and residents have since been allowed to return between eruptions, but only a few have chosen to stay overnight.
According to IMO, the eruption did not cause any lava to flow towards Grindavik.
Iceland’s famous hot springs tourist attraction, the Blue Lagoon, announced late Thursday that it had taken “precautionary measures to evacuate and temporarily close all business premises.”
Until March 2021, there had been no eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula for eight centuries. Further eruptions occurred in August 2022 and July and December 2023, leading volcanologists to warn that a new era of seismic activity had begun in the region.
Iceland has 33 active volcanic systems, the most in Europe. It straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a rift in the ocean floor that separates the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.