Striking satellite images show lava flowing towards Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon

Bright, burning Lava flows from a fissure in Iceland The Reykjanes Peninsula is so large that it is easily visible to orbiting satellites.

The image above, about five and a half miles across, was created using data collected by the Landsat 9 satellite on November 24th. If you look closely at the leftmost extent of the flowing lava, you can see a few turquoise spots. This is Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa that attracts tourists from all over the world.

Lava from the ongoing eruption nearby has flowed across a parking lot at the spa and burned a service building.

The outbreak is the latest in a series of seven that began in December 2023. It was announced by a swarm of earthquakes on the evening of November 20th. About five hours later, the Suomi NPP satellite I took the night picture of Iceland below. The light rising from the lava flows to the satellite sensor was so intense that it even appeared brighter than the Icelandic capital Reykjavík.

Here is another version from the Landsat 9 satellite showing more of the surrounding landscape of the Reykjanes Peninsula:

The Landsat image combines a natural color scene with an infrared signal to reveal the lava’s heat signature. A cloud of gas, consisting primarily of sulfur dioxide, also flows from the lava.

Iceland lies along a huge fissure in the Earth’s crust that runs roughly halfway between the North and South Atlantic. The suture is characterized by an approximately 10,000 foot high underwater mountain range known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. And at the same time, tectonic plates are falling apart, including in Iceland. Here the North American Plate moves roughly from west to southwest, while the Eurasian Plate moves east.

Tectonic forces and a huge magma cloud

When these tectonic plates diverge, cracks in the Earth’s crust open up and allow magma swell and spit out lava on the surface. This phenomenon isn’t just in Iceland – it occurs everywhere along the 10,000 mile long Mid-Atlantic Ridge. But Iceland is one of the few places where you can actually hike along the ridge and observe processes that typically occur thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface. Why is that?

Along most of the ridge, molten lava pours onto the ocean floor, cools, and is then drawn away from the seam in the crust. Because of this movement, the lava does not have enough time to accumulate enough to rise above sea level.

But Iceland is not just located on the mid-ocean ridge. It is also directly above a “hot spot” – a huge cloud of magma rising from the depths. Between the two sources, the lava eruptions were enough to raise Iceland above sea level.

Volcanic activity in Iceland is episodic. During a period of rest, tectonic forces cause stresses to accumulate in the Earth’s crust. After a period of 600 to 1,200 years, the stress is sufficient to tear the crust apart, allowing lava to flow in bursts of eruptions that last between 200 and 500 years.

“We are now in one of these pulses,” said David Pyle, a volcanologist at the University of Oxford. told LiveScience. “Each eruption releases a little more of the stored voltage, and eventually, when all of that voltage is released, the eruptions will stop.”

Conclusion: What we are seeing now on the Reykjanes Peninsula could last for many centuries.