The lava flow has already eaten its way into Grindavik here and there.

The fishing town on the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland's southwest has been a ghost town for days.

The approximately 4,000 residents were evacuated: rightly so, as this photo from last Wednesday shows.

In recent days, lava has flowed from two fissures in the earth that are hundreds of meters long near the site.

The larger lava flow is still being held back by the protective barriers on the edge of the city, which can be seen in the center of the satellite image.

The smaller lava flow, on the other hand, has already affected several houses near a roundabout.

Here you can see the image from the Munich satellite image provider European Space Imaging in detail.

This photo, taken on Sunday 14th, shows how powerful and red-hot the lava flows are.

January, was recorded near Grindavik.

The Reykjanes Peninsula is part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Here two tectonic plates are drifting apart: the North American and the Eurasian plates.

The earth's crust keeps opening up in places and lava bubbles to the surface.

Under the current eruption area there is a kind of kilometer-long tunnel filled with hot magma.

If the earth's crust opens, the excess pressure in the magma tunnel can discharge and eruptions occur - like in the past few days around Grindavik.

Although no new lava has emerged recently, the area is not calming down.

Hundreds of micro-earthquakes still occur every day.

It looks as if Iceland is facing a new era of volcanic eruptions, explained Alina Shevchenko, an expert from the German Georesearch Center (GFZ) in Potsdam, about a volcanic eruption in the region at the end of 2023, from which Grindavik was still spared.

“According to volcanological findings, these activities repeat approximately every thousand years,” says Shevchenko.

»If we go to the today

If we look at the Reykjanes Peninsula, we see lava flows and volcanic cones everywhere that are around 800 to 1000 years old.

The new eruptions could be the beginning of a new series of eruptions.« (Read the entire interview here).

In Grindavik, there is a "significant risk of cracks and collapses in the ground," warns Iceland's national weather authority.

Nobody knows if and when further eruptions will occur.

It would currently be too dangerous for people to return to the disaster area.

Grindavik remains a ghost town for now.

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