Lava started spewing forth Sunday morning from the same fissure in between Iceland's Askja and Bardarbunga volcanoes where a smaller eruption was observed earlier this week.
Iceland's Meteorological Office reports as of 7 a.m. local time that "the lava flow was around 1 km wide and 3 km long towards northeast. The thickness was estimated a few meters, the flow about 1000 m3 per second."
Scientists on site from the University of Cambridge captured this footage from the eruption. The University of Iceland says that the highest fire fountains seen are about 70 meters high. Geologists estimate that this current eruption is between 10 and 50 times larger than the earlier one.
Here's a closer look at those fountains of fire and lava:
But it's being reported that much of the lava is just calmly flowing out of the earth and onto the surface, winding up like this:
Iceland's National Broadcasting Service has this map of the eruption area, which is north of the Bardarbunga caldera, and of the huge ice cap that covers it. Over the past two weeks, the location of thousands of recorded earthquakes in the region indicates that magma seems to have flowed from Bardarbunga, creating a long underground dike that connects to the edges of the Askja fissure system, where the eruption is now taking place.
Hér sést staðsetning eldgossins. // This map shows the location of the new eruption, north of #Bardarbunga #volcano. pic.twitter.com/uwMh1k6Fri
— Fréttastofa RÚV (@RUVfrettir) August 31, 2014
While it's unclear what could happen next, this fissure eruption is one of the more desirable ways for Iceland's highly active underworld to let off some steam. The relatively calm eruptions have yet to produce much ash, and they also did not melt through the glacier, which could have caused serious flooding in the area.
The new eruption prompted the authorities in Iceland to briefly raise the alert for air travel to red, but within a few hours when it was determined that the eruption was not producing any threatening ash in the atmosphere, the restricted flight area around the area was cancelled. As of this writing, no flight restrictions are in effect and airports are open in Iceland.
An eruption of a volcano nearer to the capital of Reykjavik in 2010 disrupted flight traffic over Europe for days, leading to the cancellation of over 100,000 flights.
To keep an eye on the eruption, you can watch via this live webcam.
