NASA releases images of Iceland volcano eruption from space

NEWSWEEK

A volcano in Iceland has finally erupted after weeks of roiling activity, spewing out molten lava, thick smoke and huge amounts of heat energy visible from space

The volcano burst forth from the Earth around 1.8 miles north of the town of Grindavík, on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula, at approximately 10 p.m. local time on Monday evening, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office.

Images taken by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-owned NOAA-20 satellite at 4:00 a.m. local time on Tuesday show the level of heat being thrown out by the erupting volcano, in stark contrast to the temperature of the region the day before the eruption..

“What you’re seeing in these images is the very high temperatures of the active lava flows compared to the surrounding land and clouds,” Simon Carn, a volcanologist at Michigan Technological University, said in a NASA Earth Observatory statement. “The darker lower-temperature areas appear to be some topography that the lava is flowing around, but these could also be areas where the eruption fissure is not active and has cooler lava, or where gas plumes or clouds are obscuring the surface.”

“The rate of lava discharge during the first two hours of the eruption was thought to be on a scale of hundreds of cubic metres per second, with the largest lava fountains on the northern end of the fissures,” the Meteorological Office said in a statement on Tuesday morning.

This came after a month of waiting and monitoring, with thousands of residents from Grindavík having been evacuated on November 10 after days of seismic activity sparked fears the volcano would soon erupt. The town saw huge cracks open in the middle of roads and shifts to the ground level in the weeks leading up to the eruption.