Until just after 10pm on Monday, when the earth opened up and spat out an otherworldly 4km-long wall of lava, Sígrún Ísdal had been planning to spend Christmas at home in Grindavík with her family. Like many residents of the fishing town on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula, who were all evacuated on 10 November, she had been preparing to move back after more than a month spent in the limbo of temporary accommodation.
Ísdal, who works at Grindavík sports centre, had even been in the town briefly on Monday evening to pick up a few possessions, as residents have recently been allowed to do. “There was just good weather and I didn’t see anything,” she said.
It was only later, looking on a local Facebook group, that she saw the news: a volcanic fissure had opened up in the earth’s surface and had turned the sky for miles around a bright, dancing orange.
“We were really shocked,” she said. “Because we didn’t expect this. We thought it was not going to erupt at all. We were getting prepared to return soon. We were getting excited to celebrate Christmas at home.”
The eruption of the volcanic fissure, which sent jets of lava flying up to 100 metres into the air, at first appeared to be a huge risk to Grindavík and its 3,800 residents’ homes.
Iceland’s prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, said her thoughts were with the people of the town, adding: “Now we see the earth opening up.”
But by Tuesday morning, the worst appeared not to have happened. Lava was flowing away from the town, offering hope that many homes may be saved, and its southernmost point was still 3km from Grindavík. “The eruption does not present a threat to life,” the government said. Unlike the 2010 eruption, it is not expected to affect air travel.
Later on Tuesday, the Icelandic meteorological office said the eruption was diminishing and that lava flow had reduced to about a quarter of what it was at the start.
Grindavík’s residents appeared to have had a narrow escape, with Monday night’s eruption seeming to take everyone – from residents to authorities – by surprise. The nearby Blue Lagoon spa, a tourist attraction, had just reopened and police were making encouraging noises about a possible return to Grindavík for Christmas.
“It came up really quickly and no one was prepared,” said Sólný Pálsdóttir, 53, a teacher and photographer. “The police were saying [on Monday] maybe we could go home tomorrow [Wednesday].”
Pálsdóttir, whose Grindavík home was already on a 50cm slant as a result of the earthquakes before the eruption struck, added: “Nobody was expecting this [eruption] last night. It surprised all of the scientists.”
Her family home is the closest home to the eruption, 3km away, meaning it is practically “in my backyard”. The first indication she had that an eruption was under way came when she got a notification of a big earthquake on an app as she was about to go to sleep. Helplessly, she watched from the window of her family’s temporary accommodation in Reykjavík as the sky turned red and her sons came in to her room with Snapchat updates.
“It was strange to stand here,” she said. “It had so much power when it started that people could see it from many places.” Watching footage on the eruption webcam was surreal.
At first she feared the worst, but by about 2.30am, when more information came through, she realised it was “in the best place in the worst place”. She said: “It comes up with so much power. So people from Grindavík are just praying and praying for the best. But it is different from the others [the last three volcano eruptions on the Reykjanes peninsula since 2021].”
Ingibergur Thor Olafarson, 47, a Grindavík resident and photographer, said he first got wind of the eruption from friends who spotted warning signs in the data. Ten minutes later, there was an eruption. As a result, he was able to send his drone 3km from the fissure site early on. “The sky was an orange, beautiful scene,” he said.
Having been afraid of what would happen to his home town, he said it was a “big relief” to see it had happened outside of Grindavík.
The eruption was visible as far as 100km away, he said. “It didn’t matter which way you looked, the whole sky was just orange. Part of it was hidden behind the mountain on the way to Grindavík, so it was hard to imagine how long [the fissure] was.”
Looking at the fissure was like looking at an earthquake graph, he said. “You know the earthquake graph, it looked like that, in a long straight line, an orange fissure. Of course it looked so scary but at the same time so beautiful.”
When the sky turned orange around Unnur Íris Bjarnadóttir’s Reykjavík home, she and her family decided to get in the car to see if they could get closer to the eruption.
When the architect, 40, her husband and their children, aged 11 and 13, reached a good vantage point towards Keflavik airport, they pulled over to observe the view.
“It had just started snowing in the morning, the earth was really white,” she said. “And then there was a really big orange sky in front of us.” Others stopped by also to look at the scene, forming silhouettes in the foreground. “It was a beautiful sight to see the human scale in front of the volcano.”
In the 30 minutes or so that they stood there watching, until about midnight, they saw the fissure extend. “You could see the earth was opening up and the line was getting longer. It was beautiful to see.”
But she also felt fear about what the eruption might bring. “Often volcanos start as really beautiful and end in disasters,” she said.
