I recently made a post on the situation of how the earthquakes and land rise had really picked up in the southwest corner of Iceland, on Reykjanes peninsula, near the town Grindavik. Since then, the situation has evolved a lot from worrying to bad. Particularly a lot changed in the last 24 hours and that's why I wanted to make an update post.
In the last 24 hours, there have been over 3000 earthquakes on the Reykjanes peninsula, many of which are over 3 in magnitude and even some as large as 5s. The strongest event started after midday yesterday when a huge swarm hit the area. Here you can see the earthquake map of the past 24 hours, it looks insane.
It paints a clear picture of where the majority of the activity happens. This is a bit cleaner picture with only verified earthquakes and you can see a clear line of action. It is confirmed that magma moves closer to the surface and moves underground in these areas.
Here is a Map.is photo where I have circled in red where the most activity is concentrated, the orange circle is the town of Grindavik and the blue circle is Blue Lagoon and the thermal power plant.
Grindavik Evacuated
Later in the evening yesterday they decided to evacuate the whole town of Grindavik with 3300 people because the situation got dangerous. Large earthquakes crack the roads and homes, and magma moves directly under the town. With 4 hours Grindavik was a ghost town and still is. Nobody is allowed in the town and back home. I have been to Grindavik so many times and stayed there. I know some people that live there and I feel for them, for all the trouble they have to go through at the moment.
The main road out of the town was cracked and closed yesterday due to earthquakes.
Today a lot of damage was seen on the roads inside the Grindavik.
Here you can also see the nearby golf course that seems to be cut in half.
I saw videos filmed inside homes yesterday, in Grindavik. There was constant shaking and sounded extremely scary, not gonna lie.
There was also a small fire in the thermal power station and two power blocks went offline. Today Grindavik is without power and hot water since the hot water pipe broke that leads water to Grindavik.
They also started to build a huge wall around the Blue Lagoon and power plant in hopes of tackling the lava flow when it comes to that and saving the power plant. They now work 24/7 on building that wall. It's an extremely expensive undertaking but much worse would be to lose the power plant and MUCH more expensive to rebuild it.
Most scientists are now saying that an eruption is a very strong possibility in the near future and nothing can be said for certain where exactly. It can be everywhere in this orange circle I draw on the map. The best scenario is if it starts to erupt at the north side of the orange area then the lava won't pose immediate danger to infrastructure. Chances are that the eruption can also happen near or even in Grindavik and that would be catastrophic. Can also happen inside the ocean but that is less likely according to scientists.
Let's keep hoping that the eruption in Grindavik will not happen. This would be such a bad sight to see homes being destroyed. The situation is very fast evolving and I will be keeping an eye on things at all times. Will make another update if anything major changes there.
