Officials in Iceland are preparing for the possibility of an eruption from one of the many volcanoes in the country after a spate of recent earthquakes.
CNN reported Thursday that local officials have warned residents of the country’s southwestern region, including the capital of Reykjavik, that an eruption is possible after thousands of hooligans in the past few days.
“Of course it worries people. For this region, it’s actually quite unusual, not because of the earthquakes or their intensity, but for their duration. It’s been going on for more than a week now,” said a professor of volcanology at the University. of Iceland, Þorvaldur Þórðarson, in an interview with the network. “We are currently struggling with the ‘why’. Why is this happening? It is very likely that we will have to penetrate magma into the crust. It has certainly moved closer to the surface, but we are trying to find out if it is moving even closer to it.”
Þórðarson’s team on Wednesday released images of potential lava flows that predicted that no towns in the country would be affected by possible eruptions. However, a major carriageway connecting the country’s largest airport to Reykjavik may be less fortunate. Officials do not expect air travel to be affected by a possible eruption, according to Bloomberg.
“Based on the current model, no big city is in the wheels,” Ármann Höskuldsson, another volcanologist, told CNN.
Thousands of quakes have hit the southwestern Reykjanes area in the past week, including more than 2,600 in the past 48 hours, the country’s weather office said on its website on Thursday. A few dozen are of size 3 or higher. The Hill has reached a number of registered tremors in the past month.
One resident of the capital told CNN that the quake was almost constant.
“It is very unusual to feel the earth shaking 24 hours a day for a whole week. It makes you feel very small and powerless against nature,” said Auður Alfa Ólafsdóttir.