Iceland volcano erupts, spewing fast-moving lava

Webcams showing live images of the eruption showed white-hot bubbling pools of churning lava Tuesday morning.

“This eruption is more powerful than three former eruptions in that area and it happened unusually fast,” Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, told NBC News. “Pressure was enough to break the crust rapidly.”

“The lava flow on the ground is still in a remote area, so at this point it’s not an immediate threat to the town Grindavík or the powerplant Svartsengi. But there can still be a risk of lava flow damaging infrastructure,” he said.

The country’s meteorological office said there was “significant ground disruption” from the eruption, which could last as long as 10 days, but the intensity of the eruption was already decreasing early Tuesday.

Iceland’s civil defense coordination center has been activated as a precaution, and police raised the nation’s civil defense preparedness level, according to a statement from civil defense officials.

Authorities asked the public not to visit the area of the volcano.

While some nearby population centers have been evacuated, there have been fears that an eruption could send lava towards power plants, but experts said this was now unlikely.

“If everything is normal, this will subside in the afternoon tomorrow, the crack will begin to retreat into craters. The eruption could last a week to 10 days,” Ármann Höskuldsson, a volcanologist, told RUV, Iceland’s public broadcaster, Monday night.

However, others warned that the direction of the lava flow could quickly change.

Asked where the lava could flow early Tuesday, Volcanologist Þorvaldur Þórðarson told RUV: “That’s a good question — it could go close to major infrastructure in a relatively short period of time.”