Grindavik is now a ghost city.
It has all of the acquainted locations – retailers, cafes, colleges and residence blocks.
But they’re all empty, deserted within the rush to flee an earthquake swarm over the weekend.
We had been taken into the city beneath police escort, passing via a number of checkpoints.
Follow dwell: 800 new earthquakes elevate volcanic eruption fears
The authorities are jumpy.
The magma is now considered simply 500m beneath the floor proper on the sting of city they usually worry there could possibly be an eruption at any time.
In the city centre the bottom seems like it’s being unzipped, with a gash stretching 150m or so.
Where it crosses a important highway the rip is a few metres vast, with one aspect a metre decrease than the opposite. There are monumental forces at work, splitting megatonnes of rock.
And the earth remains to be shifting, stones shifting and tumbling down into the crack. In locations it was too deep to see the underside.
Clouds of steam rise from the gash. Hot water pipes that when heated properties and companies are actually pulled aside with the shifting floor.
The floor beneath our toes is meant to be rock strong. We even name it ‘terra firma’. But it isn’t in Grindavik, not now. You really feel it may swallow you up at any second.
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That seems like a catastrophe film, and the city seems like a Hollywood set.
But a number of days in the past this was a thriving group of virtually 4,000 individuals.
They have been allowed to sprint again to their properties in latest days to gather important belongings.
Now, that appears to have now stopped, and it is largely emergency staff left within the city.
There is not way more they will do.
Grindavik is on the mercy of the molten rock rising from beneath. And sooner or later will probably be left to its destiny.
Source: information.sky.com”