Rivers of red leave their mark on Iceland

(Source: NASA/USGS/LandSat 8)

A river of red hot lava spreads across Iceland's Holuhraun lava field.

Lava started gushing from fissures just north of Vatnajökull ice cap and the Dyngjujökull glacier (seen as blue at the bottom), in the Icelandic Highlands in August 2014.

Since then the field has covered 84 square kilometres, making it Iceland's largest basaltic lava flow since the Laki eruption of 1783-84, an event which killed 20 per cent of the island's population.

The average thickness of the field is 10 to 14 metres, and nearly 1.4 cubic kilometres of lava by volume was extruded from the Earth during the eruption.

A new lake is expected to form when summer melt water runs off of the nearby Vatnajökull glacier.

On 28 February 2015, Icelandic authorities finally declared the eruption over.

While fresh lava has stopped flowing from Holuhraun, it is possible that activity could resume.

The eruption was fed by the Bárðarbunga volcano about 41 kilometres to the south west.

Volcanologists monitoring the area report that Bárðarbunga's caldera has started rising, a sign that magma may be accumulating in the magma chamber again.

Iceland is both located above a mantle plume, and straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ocean ridge along which new crust is created, spreading out to form the North American and Eurasian continental tectonic plates.

This spectacular volcanism double whammy makes the island one of the most active geological places on Earth.

The false colour image of the lava field was captured in September 2014 by Operational Land Imager aboard NASA's LandSat 8 spacecraft. It was created by combining shortwave infrared, near infrared, and red visible light bands, to better show variations in the temperature of the lava.

This particular band combination also makes it easier to see through the plume of steam and gas rising from the fissure.

EARTH IMAGE by Stuart Gary
ABC