he night was quiet. In Iceland, Hanna Lara Andrews and her family slept peacefully in their little white farmhouse. Suddenly, the phone rang. “Get out!” a government offi cial shouted into the phone. It was 2 a.m. and the nearby volcano had just erupted. The family had to hurry. They didn’t even have time to be scared. Hanna gathered her one-year-old son and the rest of her family and bolted for the car.


T


Active Earth Hanna and her family hadn’t worried about the volcano before now. Sure, it towered over their farm. Plus, it was only about eight kilometers (fi ve miles) away. Yet they had been raising cows, wheat, and barley on Iceland for years. T e volcano had never caused trouble. Now it spewed a fountain of fi re. Ribbons


of lava oozed down its steep sides. Ash shot toward the sky. What caused all this action? To understand,


it helps to know a little bit about what’s going on inside Earth. Let’s start with the ground under your feet. It feels pretty solid, doesn’t it? Guess what? T is outer layer of Earth, called the crust, is constantly moving and shiſt ing.


Deep Heat T ink of Earth’s crust as an eggshell. T e shell is broken into more than a dozen large pieces called plates. T e mantle lies under the crust. T is layer is hot enough to melt some rock and make it fl ow like molasses. Below the mantle is Earth’s core. T e crust’s plates fl oat on the mantle. Some


bump into each other. Others scrape against each other or pull apart. What’s happening beneath Iceland? Here, two plates pull away from each other. Part of Iceland is on one plate, and part is on the other. Volcanoes oſt en rise between two plates. A


volcano is an opening in Earth’s surface. It can look like a mountain. It is a channel for molten rock, or magma, to reach the surface. As the pressure below a volcano builds,


magma starts to rise. When magma blasts onto Earth’s surface, it’s called lava.


12 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORER


A helicopter fl ies near the erupting volcano in Iceland.


Lava and Floods Lava can burn, bury, and destroy everything in its path. Yet when the Iceland volcano erupted, Hanna wasn’t worried about the lava. She worried about fl ooding. T at may seem strange, but here’s why. T e Icelandic name of this volcano is


“Eyjaf allajökull,” or Eyja for short. Its name can be broken down into three parts. In English, they mean “island,” “mountain,” and “glacier.” T at describes Eyja perfectly! A thick glacier covers this volcano. In some


places, the ice is 200 meters (650 feet) thick. T at’s where the eruption began. T e extreme heat quickly melted the ice. Hanna feared her farm now stood in the path of a raging river.

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