The Grimsvoetn volcano under Iceland’s largest glacier began erupting Saturday, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said, reporting a tall plume of smoke rising from the crater.<\/p>\n
“An eruption at Grimsvoetn has started and there’s an airplane on its way there now to investigate further,” Haraldur Eirkisson of the office told AFP.<\/p>\n
“There was a cloud rising up from Grimsvoetn around 1900 GMT and at just before 2000 GMT it had reached an altitude of 11 kilometres (6.8 miles),” he added.<\/p>\n
Grimsvoetn is Iceland’s most active volcano, having erupted nine times between 1922 and 2004. It lies beneath the Vatnajoekull glacier in the southeast of the North Atlantic island nation.<\/p>\n
The eruption in April last year of Iceland’s Eyjafjoell volcano, southwest of Grimsvoetn, shut down large swathes of European airspace for almost a month amid fears the volcanic ash could wreak havoc on aircraft engines.<\/p>\n
No two volcanic eruptions are the same, and it remained unclear late Saturday if the new eruption threatened to emit a similar kind of ash — fine, with very sharp particles — like the massive plume that burst from Eyjafjoell.<\/p>\n
The problem with last year’s eruption, according to the researchers, was that it happened under a glacier, bursting through 200-300 metres (yards) of ice.<\/p>\n
It was the “interaction between the cold water and the hot magma that made the particles really tiny,” and therefore especially dangerous to aircraft, Susan Stipp, a professor at the Nano-Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen, told AFP late last month.<\/p>\n
Grimsvoetn is however also located under a glacier, in an enormous, eight-kilometre diameter caldera — a collapsed volcanic crater — near the centre of the Vatnajoekull icefield. <\/p>\n
When it last erupted in November 2004, volcanic ash fell as far away as mainland Europe and caused some disruptions in flights to and from Iceland.<\/p>\n
Geologists had worried late last year the volcano was about to blow when they noticed a large river run caused by rapidly melting glacier ice.<\/p>\n
Eruptions at Grimsvoetn traditionally result in massive flooding, although this has little impact since the surrounding areas are uninhabited.<\/p>\n