VIDEO – Volcano in the Canaries: two new lava flows escape La Palma – LCI

New open mouths, two additional flows, more liquid lava: the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano, on the Spanish island of La Palma, in the heart of the Canary archipelago, continues to accelerate. Early this Friday, October 1, two new magma emissions were spotted by the Spanish Geological and Mining Institute (IGME) nearly 450 meters north of the crater emanating from a double mouth, reports the Spanish newspaper El País.

On its path towards the west of the island, the magma has already destroyed several buildings and passed through roads, including “one of the main arteries of the island” in the southern region, notes the daily. “The question is whether they will converge with the main stream”, indicates geologist Raúl Pérez of IGME to the newspaper. A very probable hypothesis in the eyes of the technical director of the Canary Islands Volcanic Emergency Plan (Pevolca).

This double mouth is added to the three others already open, including a source “primordial” which would have left the largest amount of lava that reached the sea. In total, 80 million cubic meters of magma have already escaped from the volcano, said Friday the President of the Government of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, “approximately twice as much as the Teneguía volcano in 1971 and in half the time”, note El País.

Thursday, September 30, the lava spewed out by the volcano continued to sink into the sea, which it had reached during the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, forming an advance of nearly twenty hectares and raising fears of a deterioration in the quality of the water. air in towns near the coast, AFP reported. In the afternoon, the flow had already traveled six kilometers since the start of the eruption eleven days ago. In total, lava now covers 476 hectares of this island which makes about 70,000, according to the local authority of La Palma.

The eruption, which left no deaths or injuries, resulted in the evacuation of around 6,000 of the island’s 85,000 residents. As of Friday morning, lava had damaged more than 1,000 buildings according to the Copernicus satellite, a figure that includes both housing, garages and farm structures, adds El País.

The eruption also produced potentially toxic gases due to the shock of temperatures, when the lava and the sea meet. “The sea water is a little over 20 degrees and the magma is over 1,100 degrees” and their contact “has the effect of an immediate change: the magma solidifies and enormous quantities of sea water evaporate, giving rise to clouds which contain chlorine”, explained to AFP Arnau Folch, vulcanologist at CSIC, the higher council for scientific research. According to the National Institute of Toxicology, the concentration of sulfur dioxide rose for the first time Thursday afternoon in Tazacorte.

But the authorities want to be reassuring: “It is clear that the closer we are to the point of emission, the lower the air quality will be, which is why we have established a minimum safety distance of 2.5 kilometers from the points of emission”, Pevolca told El País. According to their spokesperson, only 8% of the island is affected so far by the eruption, although some cities have recommended that residents avoid going out or wearing an FFP2 mask outside.

In addition, according to Fernando Tuya, researcher in biodiversity and conservation at the University of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, the first effects of the entry of lava into the sea are “devastating” with “the direct death of organisms that are going to be buried” under the casting. But in the longer term, this could constitute a “good news” for the marine life that could be “enriched”, by the creation of a rocky platform by the lava, explains the scientist to AFP.

The two previous eruptions in La Palma took place in 1949 and 1971, killing three people altogether, two of them by gas inhalation.