Astrum Space - Iceland's 1000-Year Lava Cycle Is Back | Captains Speaking

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

Iceland… is on fire. With earthquake swarms, volcanic eruptions, and lava fountains that spew fifty to a hundred metres into the air, this tiny country is experiencing volcanic activity on a staggering scale. But the engineers of Iceland are fighting back... ▀▀▀▀▀▀🔒Remove your personal information from the web at https://joindeleteme.com/ASTRUMEARTH and use code ASTRUMEARTH for 20% off 🙌 DeleteMe international Plans.▀▀▀▀▀▀Astrum's newsletter has launched! Want to know what's happening in space? Sign up here: ⁠https://astrumspace.kit.com⁠A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

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Visit perfect bistro.com to try it for your cat. Iceland is on fire. With earthquake swarms, volcanic eruptions and lava fountains spewing hundreds of metres into the air, this tiny country is experiencing volcanic activity on a staggering scale. It isn't the first time and it certainly won't be the last. This is the awakening of a thousand years cycle. A rhythm that last transformed the landscape when Vikings walk. these shores. And this is no blip on the radar. It's a geological marathon. The activity we're seeing

today could last for two to 400 years. But this time will be different. This isn't the Viking era. Today, Iceland is a modern nation of geologists and engineers who aren't going to take this lava invasion lying down. As the ground tears apart beneath their feet, they're attempting the impossible to out-engineer a continent pulling itself in two. So, can a modern society survive for centuries of fiery chaos? We're going to find out. I'm James Stewart and you're watching Astrom Earth. Join me as we explore the youngest land on the planet, delving into the ancient cycles responsible

for carving out this mythical anomaly of fire and ice. geological patterns that have left Iceland facing the ultimate test. Survival. Iceland is unique. Not only is fermented shark considered a delicacy, but geologically there's nowhere quite like it. It sits astride the mid-Atlantic ridge, a divergent boundary where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart

at a rate of around two centimetres a year. That's roughly, by the way, the same speed you'll fall. fingernails grow. As the plates separate, magma rises to fill the gaps, cools into basalt and forms new crust. And I know what you're thinking, there's nothing particularly unusual about that. But over millions of years, this process has built the longest mountain range on Earth, running down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean. Almost all 16,000 kilometres lies two to three kilometers beneath the waves. That is, until you reach Iceland. Here, land pokes its head above the surface. Why? Well, Iceland isn't just on a tectonic plate boundary. Here, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

intersects another geological phenomenon, a mantle hotspot. These are best known for creating island chains such as Hawaii, the Galapagos and the Canary Islands, all of which I might add lie in the middle of tectonic plates, not at the edge. The hotspot under Iceland instead creates the geological equivalent of a pressure cooker left on high for millions of years, turning an already active boundary into something far more volatile, producing a third of all the lava that's erupted onto Earth's surface in the last 500 years, which is not bad for a country smaller than England. Now, mantle hotspots are somewhat of an enigma, which is sort of a nice way of saying that scientists don't exactly know what causes them.

Actually, let me know in the comments below if you'd like to see a video on that another time. But for now, what we need to know is that they are driven by columns of unusually hot, buoyant rock rising from deep within the earth and pushing up through the mantle, and that they can last for tens of millions of years. Now, the important thing to note here is that these hot spots can raise mantle temperatures by as much as 200. degrees Celsius, and in doing so, the drop in pressure causes hot solid rock to melt into magma. The result is an unusually thick crust, up to 40 kilometres compared to typically 7 kilometres, and enough buoyancy to lift the ridge out of the ocean. E'Vu'u'la, an island, or in this case, an Iceland. This is the only inhabited mid-ocean ridge

on earth. In fact, visit Thinkfitlia National Park, and you can live. literally stand in the separation zone between two continents. But it's what's inside that ridge that's problematic. We often talk about tectonics in the past. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Hence, but in this case, the problem is present, very present. Iceland is a mere teenager in geological terms. The oldest rocks found in the West fjords and the eastern fjords are just 16 to 18 million years old, which is basically yesterday compared to continental Europe's half-billion-year-old crusts.

And if you thought that was impressive, well, wait for this. Winniemoo South, the land gets even younger still. It is only 3 to 7 million years old in places like the Rekhinez Peninsula. And remember that name, it's somewhere we're going to come. come back to. Now, just off the south coast is the youngest land on the planet. In the 1960s, the island of Circe erupted into existence from beneath the sea. The island is a pristine natural laboratory, allowing scientists a rare chance to study an island from birth, really. Because it began as sterile lava with a known birthday, if you like, and has remained free of human interference

thanks to strict protections, researchers can trace exactly how life builds an ecosystem, step by step, giving us an insight into processes analogues to the spreading of life on early Earth. But Iceland's youth isn't only interesting for the sake of scientific research, and this video. It's dangerous, because young land means fresh lava, and lots of it. There are around 30 volcanic systems active across the island. and over 100 volcanoes have erupted in the last 10,000 years. I say around 30 because nature doesn't draw neat boundaries.

It would be very helpful if it did. Some systems here have obvious central volcanoes. Others are long networks of underground fissures. And many are a combination of both, slipping in and out of activity over centuries. So depending on the geological criteria used to define active, the number sits somewhere between 28 and 30. And thanks to lying on such a rare tectonic sweet spot, Iceland produces almost every major style of volcanic behaviour on the planet,

from flood basalts that spread lava in vast sheets, gently built shield volcanoes, ground splitting fissure eruptions, explosive composite volcanoes, sticky riolyt domes, and even huge ash flow calderas. Nowhere else puts this entire volcanic talk in, on display quite like Iceland.

In fact, the country's image as a land of fire has become central to its identity and its economy, but it also hides a hard geographic reality. For all its beauty, the interior of the country is a vast, high, freezing desert. Often compared to the surface of the moon, its harsh conditions leave it largely uninhabited. Instead, nearly everyone lives around the coast, especially the southwest corner. The Gulf Stream keeps this part of the country relatively balmy. Winter temperatures rarely drop below minus 5 degrees Celsius,

leaving harbors ice-free year-round. Combine that with rich codstock season, why wouldn't you want to stay here? Over time, small settlements grew into towns and cities, pulling in even more people. I really can't state enough that this area is the nerve center of the nation. 80% of the population lives within an hour's drive of Reykjavik. Icelanders have cleverly leveraged the country's geological activity here to their advantage too.

Over 85% of homes are heated by geothermal water, underpinning Iceland's position as a green energy leader. High-temperature geothermal fields where hot water and steam circulate above shallow magma bodies are tapped by boreholes. Housing, swimming pools and even pavement. are warmed by the earth itself. Imagine that, underfloor heating while you walk to the shops. That's my kind of luxury. But with this growth comes new vulnerabilities. More people means more infrastructure now sits in places that will be affected by future eruptions. And by future,

I don't mean in hundreds of years. I mean as soon as tomorrow, because something even more sinister is brewing below the surface. In late 20, In 2019, something changed. Earthquake shook the ground beneath Fargradosvla, an area less than an hour was dry from Reykjvik. And I'm sorry for my pronunciation here, Icelanders, let me know how I get on. They started small, but soon multiplied and strengthened. By early 2021, more than 40,000 earthquakes shook the region any matter of weeks

in what's known as seismic swarms. terrifying, absolutely, but also a geological warning. Something was going on just a few kilometres below the surface. Seismic swarms can be caused by magma forcing its way up through cracks in Earth's crust, in what's known as an intrusion. Rock fractures, magma floods in, pressure builds, and it's often only a matter of time until it reaches the surface. In March 2021, the ground finally gave way.

and a fissure ripped open in Fargradosh, Fyach. A surreal glowing curtain of lava, 180 metres long, founted into the air before flowing into a sheltered valley. It was the first eruption on the Rekhinez Peninsula in eight centuries. I said I'd come back to this place, and it went on for nearly six months before suddenly stopping. But that was not a return to dormancy.

That was just the start. Further eruptions followed in 2022 and again in 2023. Then the activity began to migrate, shifting a few kilometres south-west to sparts Sengi, along the Suns Nukniga cratero. It was closing in fast. On the 10th of November, 2023, the decision was taken to evacuate the town of Grintovic, home to 3,700 people. The telltale seismic swarm showed that a major magma intrusion was propagating beneath the town. Days after the evacuation, fissures opened, destroying homes and damaging infrastructure.

It was described as Iceland's most severe natural disaster in 51 years, and Grintovic remains largely uninhabited today. For geologists, this was the final confirmation needed that a long, quiet volcanic sea, system had awoken, the starting pistol for a centuries-long eruptive cycle. But how do they know this is only the beginning? By bringing Viking sagas into the satellite age. This, my friends, has happened before. When you think of what Icelanders have to deal with on a daily basis, i.e. actual lava, it makes me realise I've got it pretty easy here in my very boring village in the UK, and I've got a bit complacent over the years, truth be told. I mean, there's literally a pub and a pond here.

That's it. My biggest worry right now is why did I throw my Pokemon cards away in 1998? And all that nonchalotness has given strangers a free ticket into my house without me realizing. It's kind of crazy when you think about it. We do everything we can to protect our families physically, don't we? We buy life insurance. We lock the doors at night. We install security cameras.

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Thanks to Delete Me for sponsoring this video. The link is in the description if you want your digital life a bit more private, as we head back to the video. The Norse Vikings first settled in Iceland in 874 AD, and lucky for us in this instance, were impeccable record keepers. Their annals and sagas describe fire coming out of the sea, and darkness during daytime in the Rekhiener's area between 1210 and 1240. During this period, now often referred to as the Rekhiener's fires, the peninsula was gripped by repeated fissure eruptions. Widespread environmental destruction led to devastating effects on livestock and farming,

pushing the medieval communities here to the very edge of survival. Eight centuries later, what was once recorded as folklore, have become a critical guide for modern science and potentially survival. Beneath soil and lake sediment in volcanic regions are layers of volcanic ash. When analysed, these tiny shards of essentially glass carry a chemical fingerprint with a precise mix of silica, iron, magnesium, calcium and sodium. Crucially, these fingerprints vary from one volcanic system to the next. When paired with radiocarbon dating of the sediments above and below the ash layers, as well as observations from old lava flows,

the timing and sequence of historical eruptions can be pieced back together. In March 2020, Christian Seymotson from the Icelandic Geosurvey and his colleagues, published evidence of at least three major rifting and eruptive episodes over the last 4,000 years, each lasting a few hundred years and space roughly 800 to 1,000 years apart. Now, to be honest, this would have been quite good to know before Iceland set up the majority of its economy, infrastructure and housing in this area. But even so, what on earth was causing them? The timing of all these cycles comes back to that uniquely Icelandic geological boiling pot that we talked about at the start. Yes, Iceland as a nation sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, but the Rekines Peninsula in particular,

sits directly astride it. There is no single centralised volcano here. The plate boundary itself is the volcano. As the North American anurasian plates slowly pull apart, lateral strain builds within the crust. It stretches and over time fractures. This creates underground networks of fissures that are invisible to us at the surface. As magma rises from below,

it intrudes into any nook and cranny it can find. At first, it stalls at depth, not erupting, but building pressure. For centuries this process unfolds quietly, steadily, relentlessly. The apparent calm above ground is deceptive. Eventually, the combined force of plate motion and magma pressure just becomes too much, and the crust gives way. Existing fractures are forced open, new ones tear through rock, and magma surges sideways for kilometres at a time.

through networks of thin underground dikes, triggering these seismic swarms that signal what comes next. When those intrusions finally break the surface, long fissures open and eruptions ignite along the rift. Each eruption releases some of the accumulated stress, and the rift switches on and off over decades, until centuries of tension are relieved. Then the system quietens and the cycle simply resets. And terrifyingly, the most recent seismic swarms and eruptions fit the expected cycles uncannily well. This activity is right on schedule.

But when this cycle last played out, it was medieval communities who were pushed to the brink. What can modern Icelanders really do in the face of a cycle that cannot be stopped? Well, they're going head to head with the larvae. obviously. Modern GPS and interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or INSAR, from satellites, show that before eruptions, the land inflates as magma accumulates. In 2021, some areas rose by tens of centimetres before subsiding again. Taken together with thousands of small earthquakes, magma pathways can be mapped in real time. This allows geophysicist to estimate the volume of magma involved, as well as the depth and shape of the reservoirs.

And all of this gave Iceland time to plan. Well, as much planning as you can do when it comes to huge and pending lava flows. When seismic activity first returned to the Rekines Peninsula, Iceland's Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management recognized its significance. To prepare for the looming period of increased volcanism, they established the Infrastructure Protection Group, which feels like it sort of needs its own Avengers-style superhero fanfare, doesn't it? The IPG does pretty much what it says on the tin.

This crack team of engineers, scientists and emergency planners worked to protect people and critical infrastructure from lava. As the 2021 eruptions near Faragradoshla unfolded, lava eventually spilled beyond shelter valleys and began creeping towards roads. The Department of Civil Protection made a pivotal decision. They would try and hold it back. With no recent president to draw from, this response became a real-time field experiment in lava flow engineering.

And the first challenge was deceptively simple, where to put a barrier. And that's where engineers like Horn come in. And thank you so much to her. She helped us massively in research in this video. With a background in hydrology and hydrodynamics, Horn's expertise was in modelling floods and river ice, both slow and fast-moving destructive flows shaped by gravity and terrain. Yeah, those fundamental principles, it turned out, could be applied to lava.

By using flood simulation software originally designed by the US Navy, she was able to quickly predict, with remarkable accuracy, where molten rock was most likely to go next. Teams rushed to build the first experimental barriers using whatever they could find in situ, literally anything, mud, gravel, soil from past eruptions. Cruise worked around the clock and they were close enough to feel the burn from the encroaching lava. This is serious stuff. Now the aim here was not to stop the lava outright, but to delay it, restrict it and essentially by time. These early tests show that this approach could actually

work, but they also revealed some critical lessons. Firstly, lava type matters. and it matters a lot. R-R lava is chunky and rough. When this hit a barrier, it thickened and piled up like a geological porridge. So if you want to stop it, your walls need to be built like a medieval fortress. Parhoi-hoi lava, on the other hand, is smooth and much runnier, behaving more like honey, if we're doing the breakfast metaphor thing. Interestingly, drone survey showed that it flowed over dams,

but could be redirected using angled burns. And it was this piece of information that immediately suggested that a barrier doesn't have to stop lava flow. It just needs to guide it. These initial field trials made up as they were going along led to the most ambitious lava defence project ever attempted. And as volcanic activity shifted further west, closer to towns, the lessons became more critical. Multi-kilometer barriers, up to 24 metres high, have now been built across the Reckhunez Peninsula. Such is the scale of them that two new quarries have been opened to provide enough material. The new barriers are built with compacted basalt gravel to resist heat and pressure,

and they're armoured with boulders and stabilised to prevent erosion and collapse. They're carefully shaped too, based on lava modelling to steer lava away from towns, key roads, and crucially, the Svart-Svengi geothermal power station. Of course, there are gaps in these barriers too. strategic openings for roads, pre-cast concrete bridges for pipelines and emergency access. But each one also comes with pre-positioned earthworks in place so they can be sealed within hours if necessary. And trust me, it's been necessary. Behind the scenes, the IPG works in constant coordination with the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management and Universities.

For engineers like Horn, being on call is the new normal. As seismic swarms propagate, she can have as little as 50 minutes warning before lava reaches the surface. In that time, she has to rush to her office, be there to receive the first data, which she uses to model the flow, and then she has to tell the team on the ground which gaps to close off. After the immediate threat is over, so follows more modelling, more barriers and more refinement, and so on and so on, again and again. But the good news is, so far, these models have been. incredibly accurate. Each time Horn and her team have built new barriers or increase the height

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But that job does come with tough decisions. They can't save everything. In late 2024, lava overran the car park of the famous Blue Lagoon Spa. This wasn't a failure of defences, but a reminder of priorities. Newly installed barriers were designed to protect the power station and the spa buildings.

And the car parks, well, those were sacriacons. well, those were sacrificed. RIP cars. For Grintovic, however, the limits are laid bare. No barrier on earth can protect a town from fissures that open directly beneath the streets. Beyond this system of physical defences, scientists and authorities are looking at how else they can prepare for a circa 200-year eruptive period. Plans include everything from relocating electricity masks and burying pipelines deeper within bedrock. Major road networks are being redesigned to allow for rapid rerouting, and AI is being drafted in to further improve forecasting.

Civil protection agencies around the world are closely watching this all unfold. This is the first time a modern nation has tried to engineer its way through an ongoing volcanic crisis. If it works, this will become the blueprint for a new form of geological urban defence, one that fights against the slow, relentless forces of Earth itself. Iceland truly is the ultimate land of fire, and it's as captivating as it is deadly, and that really isn't likely to change any time soon. As the latest cycle of the Reckhioners fires takes hold, Iceland will once again brace itself,

and the world will watch the latest round of humans versus nature. Whatever the outcome this time around, the feeling is that at some point, something will have to give. And for the sake of the people of Iceland and beyond, all we can do is hope it's not them. Just before I leave you, I'd love your feedback on the pronunciation of some of these words, because, oh, wow, were these ones tricky? I committed, I tried really hard, I think it went okay. If you got this far on the video, and we did a good job, leave us an Iceland flag in the comment to let us know. And if you're from Iceland, wouldn't that be amazing? I'd love to know your feedback. Thanks, and I'll see you.

the next one.