On Sunday, September 19, lava fountains shot hundreds of feet high from a volcano on La Palma in the Spanish Canary Island. This forced thousands to flee the area.
According to NPR, the volcano, La Cumbre Vieja, or "The Old Summit," was last active in October 1971. Since then, lava has been pouring from it for over three weeks. According to Reuters, the volcano will be inactive this time around.
Five fissures on the side of the volcano still allow lava to flow out in several streams. A lava stream measuring several hundred feet in width reportedly rushed over many homes in El Paso. Residents were directed to evacuate. BBC News reported that the eruption destroyed approximately 100 homes in nearby Cumbre Vieja. There have been no reports of casualties.
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Video made by our colleague Mara Asensio who is at one of the lava flows of the eruption ... goosebumps #LaPalmaeruption pic.twitter.com/XlFIOMQ1biSeptember 19, 2021 See more
It is not possible to predict that any other people will need to evacuate. According to Reuters, the lava is moving towards shoreline and should reach water by 8 p.m. on Sunday. Experts estimated that 600 million to 706 millions cubic feet (17 million to twenty million cubic meters) of the lava had been released from the volcano.
Last week, authorities warned that La Cumbre Vieja could soon erupt. They cited the fact that the island had been shaken by 4,000 small tremors since Sept. 11. El Pais reported Sept. 16.
These periods of seismic activity are known as an earthquake swarm. They can indicate that a nearby volcano may be about to blow. The tremors grew steadily closer to the Earth's surface in this instance, indicating that magma was moving upwards through the crust. Authorities also noted that ground was swelling near the epicenter of the earthquakes and had increased by 2.3 inches (6 cm) by September 16.
El Pais reported that authorities raised the possibility of a volcano eruption to yellow based on the evidence. Although it was possible for the quakes to be "amounting to nothing", Luca D'Auria (head of Volcano Monitoring Department at Canary Islands Volcano Institute) stated that he believed that an eruption would occur in the areas that were affected by the tremors.
Este impresionante time-lapse muestra cmo se vea el atardecer desde el Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos @IAC_Astrofisica, en lo que ha sido la 1ra jornada de la erupcin del #volcnLaPalmaLa cmara de @EELabs_eu seguir emitiendo en directo enhttps://t.co/5w4D1RNJ80 pic.twitter.com/8PBpqPO52ESeptember 19, 2021 See more
BBC News reported that the quakes became more frequent over the next days. A total of 22,000 earthquakes were recorded in the vicinity of the volcano during the week preceding the eruptions. D'Auria's prediction was realized on Sunday when lava burst through Cumbre Vieja. Reuters reported that authorities had begun to evacuate people and animals from the immediate vicinity of the volcano.
Involcan posted a video showing dark smoke rising from Cumbre Vieja around 3:36 PM local time Sunday. The Volcanic Ash Advisory Center in Toulouse reported shortly after that tall ash plumes could be seen rising from volcano's gushing lava springs.
Some news reports about the eruption raised concerns that the eruption might send a "megatsunami", a tsunami, toward the Eastern U.S., as lava streams surged across La Palma. This fear has been proven false multiple times, Newsweek reported.
Original idea came from a 2001 Geophysical Research Letters study that suggested that a large chunk of Cumbre Vieja could collapse into the Atlantic Ocean if it ever erupted. According to the study authors, the volume of the chunk could be between 35 and 120 cubic meters (150 and 500 cubic kilometers), and could send waves as high as 82 feet (25m) into the coast of the United States.
Recent surveys of Cumbre Vieja have shown that experts believe such a massive collapse is unlikely. Dave Petley, an expert in landslides at the University of Sheffield wrote this blog for the American Geophysical Union. Recent studies have shown that in the worst case scenario, 19 cubic miles (80 km) of rock could slide off the volcano, creating a wave measuring 6.5 feet (2m) high by the time it reaches the Eastern Seaboard.
"But the current eruption in La Palma?" "It's very, very likely that it will remain a local danger," Robin George Andrews, a volcanologist and science journalist posted on Twitter. "Don't believe in fearmongering."
Original publication on Live Science
