It’s eight within the morning and pitch darkish as we climb into the Iceland coastguard helicopter. This far north, it will not be mild for hours.
The darkness could make the pilots’ jobs tougher – counting on evening imaginative and prescient helmets to navigate – however it helps the remainder of us.
For as we strategy the positioning of the eruption, all we will make out is faint orange smudges of sunshine.
Just 72 hours in the past we’d have been flying over a two-mile-long curtain of fireplace: Lava being pressured 40-50 metres into the air by an enormous chamber of magma lower than a kilometre beneath the floor.
Only just a few hours earlier than we took off, webcams confirmed just a few cones of lava have been nonetheless sputtering away within the darkness.
But it is now like trying into the embers of a dying hearth.
We are available for a precarious touchdown on a hilltop subsequent to the lava subject, guided by a highlight to seek for even floor.
The concept is to provide seismologist Dr Kristin Jonsdottir, from Iceland‘s meteorological workplace, a extra secure view of the lava – not that it modifications what was apparent from the air.
“It’s a huge surprise the lava activity has stopped,” she tells me, as we peer down on the nearly darkish lava subject.
The exercise of the eruption has been slowing, however few anticipated it to cease so rapidly given the preliminary surge of lava: at one level, equal to 4 occasions the circulation of water down the Thames in London.
But it is excellent news for the primary responders and emergency planners who it now seems like will get a break for Christmas in any case.
It’s additionally some aid for the 4,000 evacuated residents of Grindavik, who have been allowed again to their houses for just a few hours at this time.
Huge cracks appeared within the city final month as rising magma lifted up the bottom beneath. There have been considerations it might be consumed by a river of lava.
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The eruption stopped just a few kilometres away, sparing the city’s energy plant and the massively well-liked Blue Lagoon hydrothermal spa.
But there’s little prospect of residents being again of their dwelling earlier than Christmas.
Some aren’t positive they even need to return. We met Sigridur Jonasdottir packing up her final remaining possessions.
“I don’t think I’ll come back,” she tells me.
After earthquake harm, seven weeks of evacuation, and the specter of rivers of fireplace operating down the hill into city, she does not imagine she’ll be capable to keep in her home – or promote it.
The volcano could go silent for hundreds of years as soon as once more however for her the long run is just too unsure.
Source: information.sky.com”