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Chasing the Lava Flow in Iceland

By mid-March, the people of Grindavík, a commercial fishing town at the western end of Iceland’s southern coast, were exhausted. 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. 

Icelanders are also used to volcanic eruptions. 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. Read on to see how land was submerged by land.