Icelandic volcano eruption slows down, spa resort evacuated

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – A volcano in southwestern Iceland spewed lava and smoke for a second day on Friday, the country’s meteorological office said, after the eruption forced the evacuation of a nearby luxury spa resort.

Fountains of glowing molten rock could be seen shooting into the night sky after Thursday’s eruption on the Reykjanes peninsula, but the flow from the volcano has since slowed, said Rikke Pedersen, head of the Nordic Volcanological Centre.

“This is the typical start of an eruption,” she said. “We have a quite intense fountaining and high output in the beginning and it rapidly declines, but that doesn’t tell us anything about how long it will last.”

Lava initially flowed out of the volcano at a rate of up to 2,000 cubic metres (70,600 cubic feet) per second, with the current, slower rate now comparable to the last eruption in May, she added.

The fissure in the volcano, which has erupted six times since December, expanded to up to 5 km (3.1 miles) during the day from 3.9 km (2.4 miles) late on Thursday, Pedersen said.

The nearby Blue Lagoon luxury spa, a major tourist attraction with large outdoor pools heated by geothermal energy, was evacuated late on Thursday and remained shut on Friday, the resort said in a statement.

Some 1,300 guests and staff were at the spa, Icelandic daily Morgunbladid reported.

The meteorological office warned that gas pollution from the eruption could be carried by the wind towards the south and southeast.

The nearby fishing town of Grindavik, which was threatened by burning lava and hit by earthquakes during some earlier eruptions, was not directly impacted, the office said, and Pedersen said lava flows had stopped short of a nearby road.

Air traffic in and out of the capital’s Keflavik Airport was not affected, it said on its website on Friday.

(This story has been refiled to add the dropped words ‘per second’ in paragraph 4)

(Reporting by Isabelle Yr Carlsson and Tom Little; Editing by Terje Solsvik, Louise Rasmussen and Helen Popper)