I couldn’t see anyone else on it and began to fear that I’d missed out on what Snorrason had described to me as “the hottest spot in Iceland, literally.” In the early weeks of the eruption, he’d said, Fagradalsfjall was an impromptu festival where you might encounter drunken revellers or the Icelandic President. I parked beside a wooden stake on which someone had hung a lost hat, and spotted in the distance a newly laid path, which cut across a vast field of evil lava, hazed by moss, before angling upward and into the mountains. A sandwich board was leaning against an uninhabited white trailer, advertising “ LAMB SOUP / FISH N’ CHIPS / HOT-DOGS.” It was therefore disconcerting when, on that late-May afternoon, I drove to the end of an access road and entered a brand-new-but empty-parking lot. On my computer, in New York, I’d seen videos of people cooking eggs on cooling lava, playing volleyball there, and getting married as craters oozed behind them. Depending on the strength and direction of the wind, the crater’s emissions of potentially lethal gas could force the Icelandic authorities to shut the site down until conditions improved.īecause of the Fagradalsfjall eruption’s location near both the capital and the country’s biggest airport, it quickly established itself as Iceland’s latest volcanic mass-tourist attraction. While researching the trip, I’d learned that hiking to the site might require crossing a treacherously potholed expanse of eight-hundred-year-old illahraun, or “evil lava,” which could easily result in a broken ankle. The eruption could be seen from Reykjavík, some twenty miles northeast, but I wanted to witness it up close. In one particularly steep section, there was-or was not-a rope. The route was extremely, or only moderately, difficult. Information about how far, and how hard, the hike to the crater would be proved elusive and contradictory. On May 26th, I drove through Grindavík, and along the edge of the wild, Caribbean-blue North Atlantic, to see the Fagradalsfjall eruption. Minutes after returning home, Snorrason’s daughter fell asleep. Snorrason and his daughter were two of the first people to witness a volcanic eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula since the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Scientists later confirmed that, at 8:45 p.m., a six-hundred-and-fifty-foot-long fissure opened near Fagradalsfjall-which means the Mountain of the Beautiful Valley. She pointed toward the mountains north of the road: behind them, surges of pink, red, and orange light brightened the sky. Though it was now past her bedtime, Snorrason’s daughter remained wired and awake. First, she and her father visited the fishing boats in the harbor then they drove toward a two-lane highway, the Suðurstrandarvegur Road, which runs along a largely uninhabited stretch of Iceland’s southern coast. On March 19th, just after 8 p.m., Snorrason’s seven-year-old daughter asked to go for a car ride. This year, when the earthquakes resumed, scientists recorded the most intense activity six miles northeast of Grindavík, near a comparatively remote mountain that is surrounded by valleys. Yet the earthquakes quieted down, and the lava remained underground, as if, like the rest of the world, it were abiding by pandemic lockdown protocols. The prospect of all three being threatened by lava aroused considerable concern. The activity then centered on Thorbjörn, a mountain situated close to Grindavík and the Svartsengi geothermal power station-which supplies heat and electricity to the peninsula-and also to the Blue Lagoon thermal baths, one of the country’s major tourist attractions. The weeks of rumbling suggested that the system was about to become active again, but such warnings had sounded a year earlier, when similar swarms shook the peninsula. Three-quarters of the island’s population live either on the peninsula or in the nearby metropolitan zone of Reykjavík, the capital. Yet the Krýsuvík-Trölladyngja volcanic system-which extends narrowly through the Reykjanes Peninsula, in the country’s southwest-hadn’t erupted for seven or eight hundred years. Icelanders are also used to volcanic eruptions. “I don’t think people were afraid, but they were very tired.” “Earthquakes, or bad and very dangerous weather, we are used to it,” he said. Svanur Snorrason, a journalist who lives near the town’s harbor, told me that locals were “pretty much going insane” from sleep deprivation. For the previous three weeks, a strong seismic swarm had produced thousands of earthquakes per day, ranging from gentle tremors to tectonic disruptions powerful enough to jolt a person awake at night. By mid-March, the people of Grindavík, a commercial fishing town at the western end of Iceland’s southern coast, were exhausted.
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