After 3 days of apparent calm if not a pause in the eruptive activity, lava returned to the crater yesterday, filling it with a lava lake that fed new surface flows from its main outlet channel as the attached pictures show, a friend of our took yesterday (link to original post on facebook).
Most lava continues to enter the Meradalir valley to the east, but some of the flow branches also traveled south.
Both tremor and lava effusion rate have increased again. The output is now estimated at 11.3 cubic meters per second, while the total erupted lava volume and area covered by lava stand at 109 million cubic meters and 4.3 square kilometers, respectively.
The eruption has now been going on for 4 and a half month. How long it will eventually last nobody can predict.
Although during the past two months or so, its intensity was fluctuating as it went through phases with lower and sometimes almost no activity (at least not visible at the surface) during shorter intervals, at least at the moment, it has gained pace again and reached levels similar to the highest recorded so far – this might suggest it might actually be far from over.
