Iceland`s Hekla volcano `ready to erupt`
Baku, July 7 (AZERTAC). One of Iceland`s most feared volcanoes looks ready to erupt, with measurements indicating magma movement, Icelandic experts said, raising fears of a new ash cloud halting flights over Europe.
The Hekla volcano is close to the ash-spewing Eyjafjoell, which last year caused the world`s biggest airspace shut down since World War II, affecting more than 100,000 flights and eight million passengers.
The Iceland Civil Protection Authority said it was closely monitoring the situation.
"The movements around Hekla have been unusual in the last two to three days," University of Iceland geophysicist Pall Einarsson said.
While this might not necessarily mean an immediate blast, "the volcano is ready to erupt", he stressed.
"The mountain has been slowly expanding in the last few years because of magma buildup," he explained.
Another geophysicist, Ari Trausit Gudmundsson, also said the measurements around Hekla were very "unusual" and that the volcano looked ready to blow.
"Something is going on," he said, stressing though that "if or when the volcano erupts is unclear."
The volcano, dubbed by Icelanders in the Middle Ages as the "Gateway to Hell," is one of Iceland`s most active, having erupted some 20 times over the past millennium, most recently on February 26, 2000.
Hekla, which is not far from Eyjafjoell and has gone off about once a decade over the past 50 years, is known for its extremely varied and hard-to-predict eruptions, with some lasting only a matter of days and others lasting months and even years.
Measuring 1491 metres and located about 110 kilometres east of Reykjavik, Hekla is so active that scientists estimate about 10 per cent of the tephra - the solid matter ejected when a volcano erupts - produced in Iceland over the past millenium, about five cubic kilometres, comes from this one volcano.
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