The lava flow caused by the new volcanic eruption which began on Sunday morning on the Reykjanes peninsula (southwest Iceland) and reached hours later evacuated city of Grindavík has begun to subside, Icelandic public television RÚV reported this Monday.

The Icelandic authorities had announced the day before the start of an eruption, which initially caused the opening of a fissure 900 meters from Grindavík and then another smaller one, to the southwhich did reach three houses in the town and which stopped last night.

The city, of just under 3,000 inhabitants, had been evacuated on Saturday night due to the start of seismic activity. “It is not surprising that this fissure to the south has stopped. The eruption has also subsided in the other larger fissure, so in general the activity has decreased considerably,” Magnús Tumi, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, told the public radio station Rás 2 today. Tumi assured that it is not yet possible to know how long the current eruption could last and recalled that the produced last month lasted for two and a half days.

The Icelandic Government will hold a meeting throughout Monday to discuss the consequences of the eruption. The seismic activity recorded on the Reykjanes Peninsula led the authorities to declare an emergency situation at the end of November and announce an imminent eruption, which caused Grindavík to be evacuated.

The explosion finally occurred on December 19, but subsided on the 21st, and the authorities allowed the return at the end of that month of residents whose homes had not been damaged by the earthquakes. Iceland is a volcanic island located in the North Atlantic that has a population of about 370,000 inhabitants and an area of ​​more than 100,000 square kilometers.