Iceland experiences frequent volcanic activity due to its location on the Mid Atlantic Ridge in the North Atlantic Ocean.
This area is where the major Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet.
The plates are pulling apart by a few centimetres every year, producing volcanic rift zones in Iceland, the UK Met Office says.
Eruptions from these zones can occur from the central vent of a volcano or from linear “fissures” – the latter of which we’ve seen at the Reykjanes peninsula this week.
The Met Office says Iceland is also “widely considered to be underlain by a ‘mantle plume’, a hot zone in which there is increased melting of rock in the earth’s mantle”. “Such a ‘hotspot’ causes enhanced volcanic activity in addition to that already occurring due to the spreading movement of the plates,” it says.
The new eruption is happening on a peninsula where the Mid Atlantic Ridge meets the southwest shore of Iceland.Suzan van der Lee, a seismologist at Northwestern University in the US, told the Washington Post: “That whole peninsula is like a volcano. And the whole Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a line of volcanoes.”
