Volcanic exodus – An Icelandic town’s uncertain future | DW Documentary

Volcanic exodus – An Icelandic town’s uncertain future | DW Documentary

On January 14, 2024, disaster struck the coastal Icelandic town of Grindavík. There was never supposed to be the possibility of a volcano eruption in Grindavík. Just around Grindavík. A crack opened in the earth’s surface. Lava began flowing towards the town. The Grindavík deformation is unprecedented globally for having the formation of the rift valley in the middle of a populated area. More than 3 thousand people were evacuated. Residents could only look on as lava flows bore down on their homes. We saw the lava slowly moving into town, and it was just like watching a disaster movie in slow motion. You couldn’t do anything. When you see the first house go, everybody felt pain. You knew Grindavík would never be the same. For the first time in 800 years, the lava field beneath Grindavík is once again active. The town’s inhabitants are now scattered all over Iceland torn between the need to carry on with their lives, and the hope that they may yet be able to return home. We had a town meeting with the government, and I told them that story. Just so they would understand how mentally hard it is to not have a home, lose all your money, at the same time as you lose your community, your security net. Residents have had to be relocated, businesses closed. One man who fell into a crack in the earth’s crust couldn’t be rescued. The question for residents is: When will it be safe to return to their homes? Or will Grindavík remain a ghost town forever? When we look at the distribution of where the graben is in Grindavík, it’s a low-lying area. We know that lava is like water. It’s like a river. It takes the lowest level in the landscape. Rivers don’t flow over the top of mountains. Lava doesn’t flow over the top of mountains. So, the easiest path is to go straight through town. There’s nothing that can be done. Bryndís Gunnlaugsdóttir Holm was born in Grindavík. Like the other over 3,000 residents of the coastal town, she had to leave her home on very short notice. Today, she’s coming back to Grindavík for the first time in weeks hoping to recover a few last items from her house. You go home. But it’s not home. It’s not the same. My house is almost empty. There’s no people there. There’s no joy. Now it just hurts going there. I’ll be so mad if this thing is closed. Is the road open? The rules on who’s allowed to enter the town can change by the minute. Iceland’s Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management keeps track of everyone who’s in Grindavík at any time of the day or night. That way, authorities can evacuate the town immediately in the event of another eruption which could happen at any time. Thanks. The authorities tell Bryndís to drive straight to her house, and to leave again as soon as possible. In the movies, you see the volcanoes, and you always think about the volcanoes and you think about the lava. But what is really destroying the town is not the volcanoes and the lava. It’s the earth moving because of it. And there are cracks going through town, and they’re just opening up the town. They’re destroying houses. The disaster occurred not 50 kilometers from the Icelandic capital, Reykjavík. Aside from the 900-meter long fissure northeast of Grindavík, another crack opened at the northern edge of the town, scorching three houses with lava. Bryndís’ house just barely escaped being swallowed up as well. My house is very close to the lava that came into town. My yard has been fenced off because there is a crack going through it. It doesn’t feel safe. And yeah, it hurts. You didn’t want the lava to go into town. But when it went into town and it took the first house, the damage was done. The town was hurt. And I remember the only thing I wished for at the time was, that the lava would go all the way and take my house, because the pain of not knowing what the future would look like, or if my house would be I would get no money for it. Or if I would lose all my investment. It was so much that I rather wanted the lava to go over my house, and everything would have been done, over with. I would be paid by the insurance. And I could move on with life. There’s no one here. There’s no reason to be here. And the people who are here are usually working in an old town by the harbor. It’s just a ghost town. It’s just sad to come home because it’s not home. There’s like an opening between here. Like here, there’s a gap because the floor is kind of sinking a little bit. But I miss it. The pain of not knowing your future and having all your savings in a house that you can’t sell, you can’t live in, you can’t be there, and not being able to build a future and that, you know, I’m pregnant. I just want to build a home. I want a nest. I want to have a baby in a secure environment. I’ve been born and raised here, I was in school here as a kid. I had my all my friends, all my family here. I was on the city council. I helped build the town. I’ve coached basketball. All my big life events have happening been here, and it was always supposed to be here. It doesn‘t have any air in it. It’s been left here too long. This one is alright. Bryndís regularly checks her phone for updates. At any time, she might learn that the ground has opened up even more, or that researchers have managed to estimate when if ever Grindavík will become habitable again. One of those researchers is Gregory de Pascale. A few kilometers away, he’s working to answer these questions so vital to Grindavík’s future. I think I was always curious. I really love mountains, so I was really curious why mountains are there. Why do you have areas that are flat and why do you have areas, you know, big spiky peaks like the Alps, or the Andes, or the Rocky Mountains? Tectonics are really the driving force. It’s kind of a balance between tectonics and climate. Gregory De Pascale teaches tectonics and structural geology at the University of Iceland. He and graduate student Danielle Forster are studying the fissures in the earth’s crust from the air, tracking how they change. We’re doing repeated surveys of the cracks over time with the drones. And so, we can use drones to survey. So, we’re doing high resolution photography. The photos we can stitch together using a modeling technique called photogrammetry. And we can make very high-resolution photos. We can actually have photos or models that are on the order of like ten-centimeter resolution. So, it’s incredibly high resolution. So, we can track how these faults and fissures move, or do not move over time. Using this digital photography. Danny, just keep an eye out. If you mind, maybe even just go to that hill, see if it looks safe to go on top of it, and just look for any helicopters or planes. So, we are located in the North Atlantic, and we’re not far from the Arctic Circle right now. This is an oceanic spreading center. So, it’s basically an area where we’re creating new crust. The earth is actually extending in this area. And most of the time it doesn’t actually do any extending. It’s just sitting there, waiting. And then at some point, stress builds up on the system. And when the faults rupture, the energy that we experience is an earthquake. Sometimes the stress in the system needs hundreds, sometimes thousands of years before something happens. Gregory takes hundreds of photos. Later, he’ll combine them into one high-resolution image. Danielle records all the important data needed for a geological computer model. On the way back, it’s 210 meters. And then I’ll try to come back even lower. Maybe at 150 meters. Drones are a radical revolution in how science is done. I’m trying to teach our students how it’s done. Sorry, I’m trying to monitor this as well. If I go too far, I’m in the Atlantic Ocean. But no, things are changing really, really rapidly. Every time we have earthquakes, we want to see if these are moving still. It’s really important for recovery and safety because there’s, you know, still people working nearby here at some of these factories. And it of course could still erupt again. We think it’s going to erupt at any time. The past three years have seen repeated eruptions in the region. But only recently have they started affecting residential areas. And it’s not just the inhabitants of Grindavík. In February 2024, an eruption disrupted hot water supplies to 30,000 people living nearby at a time when temperatures were around minus-ten degrees Celsius. In order to predict future eruptions as accurately as possible, researchers have set up thirty GPS stations around Grindavík. Between eruptions, the whole thing starts to dome up over a large area. And so, these GPS stations record how that’s moving over time. And then effectively, when the eruptions take place, it’s like pricking the top of a balloon. The balloon starts to deflate back down. And so, these stations will actually move down between eruptions, or immediately after eruptions. And then they start inflating again slowly. And so, it’s one of the monitoring ways we use to track how things are changing over time. They’re really important. The GPS data is vital for Grindavík’s safety. Before the ground began opening up, this was one of Iceland’s wealthiest towns thanks to its abundant fishing industry. Seafood companies are eager to get processing plants up and running again. But first, the protective barrier around the town has to be extended, to divert lava around residential areas. It’s an expensive undertaking. Before the disaster, Grindavík’s economy was strong enough to support several professional sports teams. Bryndís is co-coach of the town’s female basketball team. Since evacuating, basketball games are some of the few chances she has to meet other former residents. We’re practicing now in, the gym, that is kind of like our home away from home. And we have a game tomorrow against Njardvík, that’s like our rival team, sort of. We make it work, because this is what we need to keep the community together. People love showing up for games and I can just see in their faces how much the team is inspiring them to keep on. And the girls know, they feel it too, they feel the responsibility, and they’re actually handling it unbelievably well. The team’s captain is Hulda Björk Ólafsdóttir. Like so many others, she was torn away from her home and her community. I absolutely hate it. Like, I’m such a homebody. I really love my hometown and all the people in the town. I like just the community. It’s really scary. Just like, really sad. Like, heartbreaking. During this time, this is like my escape from everything. Hulda and her teammates currently train six times a week. They’re in the middle of Iceland’s Premier League season. But basketball has become much more than just a game for the Grindavík players. We can meet up at the court, and it’s safe and it’s happy, and we can actually fight and argue and let out some energy. And it’s good. It’s good for everybody, both the players and the fans. Back at the University of Iceland, Gregory De Pascale compiles the geological data from his excursion to Grindavík. So, this is the main western boundary of what we’re calling the Grindavík Graben. We flew over this, to try to understand basically if things are changing or not. There’s only a little bit of evidence we can see for movement within a couple hundred meters of this crack. And then after that, there’s nothing further west. So, everything’s happening from this crack, and east. So, most of the populated areas east of this place. On the surface, the cracks appear small, but beneath them are chasms up to 40 meters deep. The researchers even found saltwater at the bottom of some. The tone changed. When these eruptions were taking place in the middle of nowhere, and the impact was basically a bit of smoke. I mean, I can see why people get into volcano tourism. It’s very, very special. But then it changed for Grindavík, and suddenly it became serious. According to Gregory’s assessment, Bryndís and the rest of Grindavík’s residents won’t be able to return home for the foreseeable future. From my perspective, yeah, it is really bad. I mean, we call it a permanent ground deformation. It’s like these faults moved, and they’re not going back. We know from the history of Iceland that Iceland is going to keep splitting apart. So, the tendency is for those faults to keep moving over time. We can’t go back in time. We don’t have a time machine to say, “Don’t build in Grindavík.” But now that we know that all these faults are there, maybe we should be really conscientious about land use. Many of Grindavík’s former residents are still looking for new homes. Bryndís was able to move in with her partner, Hafsteinn Valdimarsson. But it’s not quite how the couple had hoped to start this new chapter of their lives. It wasn’t supposed to happen on a Friday afternoon in a chaotic situation, and me crying all the time. It was supposed to be a happy, joyous moment with, you know, I always pictured the truck coming with all the furniture, all my stuff and we will, like, sit down on the couch in the evening, so happy, finally living together. But instead, it was like me, my basketball friends that came with us, the two cats. And I was crying watching TV about what would happen to my town. It’s not how you want to start living together. I just hope, of course, that in May we will have a good and healthy baby. And we can start our journey as a family of three together. When our daughter will be six years old, or ten years old, that we’re not going past Grindavík where there is this ghost town. And we will have to say something like, “Oh, your mom used to live here in this town.” And she will be like, “Okay, she was living here.” But instead, she can go to visit some friends who are like, “Oh, your mom used to live here, but, this thing happened, but now everything is fine.” Hopefully, that’s the dream scenario, but of course, you never know. You just have to fix saying “they” will move back to “we” will move back. Maybe someday, you never know. You never know. When you stop playing volleyball. Then we will have the talk. Remember? I will play volleyball until I’m 50. The worst-case scenario would probably be if the town would go under lava or, you know, they would deem it unfit to live in, and we just have to abandon it. Kind of like Chernobyl. I would say it’s a little bit normal now, because especially from Christmas, we have had two or three already. So, it’s kind of like, like you say now, we are almost making fun of it, making bets like, “Oh, when do you think the next volcano will come?” So, it’s kind of almost like a game now. So, it’s, I think we are starting to get used to it a little bit, but of course we are still, you know, afraid of what it will do to the town and the towns nearby, also. While most want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the volcano, others are trying to get as near as they can. My wife says every time: I have a mistress, and it’s a volcano. One of them is volcano hunter Björn Steinbekk. It’s the totally same experience as when you when you fall in love. I mean, it’s totally the same experience, and I know people are going to be out there like, “This guy is so freaking crazy”. But that’s what it is. So, you know, you see something and you get really fascinated. Then you go like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to see it again.” I mean, just like, you know, when you meet a woman or a boy or whatever. I mean, that’s just the feeling you get. You just want to see that person again, and again, and again. You basically want to consume it. It’s the exact same feeling I had when I saw the volcano for the first time. Even when Björn is watching his son Tristan play soccer, he always keeps an eye on the latest earthquake data, so that he won’t miss the next spectacular eruption. It’s a waiting game. Is it going to erupt? Is it not going to erupt? I’m thinking about the next eruption 24/7. I check the seismic activity, probably two, or three, or four times an hour. I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep, so it all combines, and it gets pretty exhausting. Björn’s son Tristan doesn’t share his father’s obsession. He’s just always asking if there is an eruption. It’s kind of annoying. I just don’t have interest in it. I don’t care much about it. If an eruption happens right now, I would just let Tristan know that I have to go. I would jump in my car, go to my house and we would be out there in, an hour, hour and a half. Today is a big day for Grindavík’s basketball fans. The women’s team is playing against their arch rivals from Njardvík. This is a big game for us, not just because we’re teams number two and three, but it’s also because this is our neighboring town. Unfortunately, we’ve been usually the team that loses. I want to feel a little bit of stress because that means that this matters to me. This matters to the team. I have the right kind of amount of stress to get me focused and prepared for the game. The Grindavík fans have come to support their team, and to catch up with friends. This is actually the moment that makes my day, to come here and see the people from Grindavík. Because this is literally the only time of the day where you see everybody. Competing here and playing basketball after all this situation at home, it’s kind of crazy. Many people are traumatized. So many people that can’t even think about going back, ever. So afraid of volcanoes, earthquakes. It was a scary situation. But time can heal, and I hope that everybody makes a U-turn from that thinking. Being here and seeing them is an amazing feeling. This is what we miss the most. The game is neck-and-neck. Njardvík and Grindavík are tied. Hanging over the contest is the fact that this could be Grindavík’s last season. Without training facilities or local sponsors, the team can’t support itself. If this is the last season, which I don’t believe, then it would be great to say goodbye on the top, win the title for the people of Grindavík. In the end, Grindavík wins, 77 to 69. I’m just super happy and super proud of my team. I don’t know how to describe the feeling. Like, just playing on the court for my home team, in my home uniform. It was just amazing. I love every time I have a game. I’m just super excited. For me, this is the only place where I feel like I’m still in Grindavík doing something for Grindavík. On the court, with the town cheering them on. And it’s just great. It made me so proud. I feel like a proud mom. A few days after Grindavík’s victory on the court, the ground explodes again without any warning. The eruption lasts for weeks and forms a permanent crater. The town is spared the lava, for now. But even so, the Icelandic government offers residents to buy their homes. Bryndís and her neighbors can finally move on and look to the future. I decided that I want to sell my house, because I want to buy a new home where I can feel safe, where I can have my family, my baby, and that way I’m financially secure. That way I can take care of myself mentally, and I have the energy to actually focus on keeping the community together, keeping Grindavík alive, away from Grindavík. Despite researchers’ wary outlooks, Bryndís hasn’t given up hope for her home town. I plan on going home. I don’t know when, but at some point. I want to help rebuild it.

In Iceland, volcanoes are a fact of life. In November 2023, an eruption near the coastal town of Grindavik forced the entire population to evacuate. It’s still unclear whether they’ll ever be able to return.

Bryndís Gunnlaugsdóttir Holm was one of the 3,800 evacuated residents. Her house was nearly engulfed by the encroaching lava. There’s now a large crack running through her yard, a situation the police say could be life-threatening if she were to take a wrong step. Ongoing earthquakes and eruptions have caused huge cavities to form beneath the town.

Gregory De Pascale is a professor of tectonics and structural geology at the University of Iceland. He doubts whether Grindavik will ever be able to return to normal life. There simply aren’t any structural solutions available to counteract such natural forces, he says. That means the fishing community, located some 55 kilometers southwest of Reykjavik, could remain a ghost town.

Grindavik’s former inhabitants are now scattered all over Iceland. But while some want to stay as far away as possible from the volcano, others are trying to get as near as they can. One of them is Bjorn Steinbekk, a volcano hunter whose passion is observing eruptions up close.

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