Magma flowed into the dike beneath Grindavík at an unprecedented rate of 261,000 cubic feet per second (7,400 cubic meters per second) before the volcano first erupted in Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula, according to a new study.
"We were very surprised," lead author Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, told Live Science in an email. During the three previous eruptions in the region that took place between 2021 and 2023, magma flow into the dike was estimated to be less than 3,500 cubic feet per second (100 cubic m per second). "For the Grindavík dike it was almost 100 times higher," Sigmundsson said.
