'Iceland's volcanoes could erupt for centuries' says UK volocanologist

Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula is reawakening. Earlier this month, a volcanic eruption spilled molten lava into the town of Grindavik, forcing the local population to evacuate and melting many homes to the ground.

It wasn't always like this. For the past 800 years, Reykjanes has been a relatively peaceful place. But January's eruption was the fifth on the Peninsula since 2021 and appears to be the start of a new cycle of volcanic activity on the Peninsula. That's the view of Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist and researcher at the UK's Lancaster University.

"It seems to be a reawakening of this volcanic zone in southwest Iceland, called the Reykjanes Peninsula," he told CGTN Europe. "It's been dormant for about 800 years, 781 to be precise. During that period, there's been occasional earthquakes. There's been some offshore eruptions, but nothing on land. 

"And then in 2020, we saw a series of very large, intense earthquakes, huge amounts of seismic energy being released. This led up to the first eruption in 2021 and then with an eruption in 2022 and one in 2023 and then we had a bit of a gap, and then we had a completely new volcanic system awakening.”

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For the residents of Grindavik, it's an uncertain time. Defenses that were built in December were breached by the January eruption and those locals that were forced to evacuate did so with just the clothes they were wearing and some essential possessions.

Now, the town's population of 4,000 people are all asking the same question: how long will the eruptions last? The storied history of Reykjanes may help to predict its future and that of its stranded population. 

"Over the past 4,000 years, we've seen three cycles where we've had long periods of dormancy and then shorter periods in which eruptions have occurred," said McGarvie. "And if this is indeed the start of a new episode, a new cycle of eruptions, it could go on for several centuries.”

But experts can't be certain. The reason for that is that Reykjanes is a unique volcanic environment, with a very different structure to other famous volcanic sites. "Reykjanes doesn't have what anyone would call a typical volcano," explained McGarvie. "When I take people on guided trips you won't see anything like a conventional Mount Fuji volcano."

He added: "Instead, you have a number of lumps on the landscape, but these are not long -lived volcanoes. This part of Iceland, for reasons that we don't understand, lacks the long-lived thermal connection to the depths, towards the crust, which produces the volcanic structures. We don't quite understand why and this hinders our understanding of what's going on."

It may seem hard to believe for those worst affected by the eruptions, but they could have long term benefits for the country. "One of the curious positives from eruptions in this area is that the largest lava flows will reach the sea," says McGarvie. "What that essentially does is build new land and protect the existing land of Iceland. 

"And that's one of the positives. We have plenty of evidence for that, in this part of Iceland, lavas, which we see building out and building new land because the North Atlantic is quite a fierce, intrusive ocean. And you can see that around the coastline of Iceland. So this is helping to safeguard the future of the island."

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