ICELAND'S most active volcano has started erupting, just over a year after another eruption on the North Atlantic island shut down European air traffic for weeks.
Iceland's Meteorological Office confirmed that an eruption had begun on Saturday at the Grimsvotn volcano, accompanied by a series of small earthquakes.
Meteorological spokesman Haraldur Eirkisson reported a tall plume of smoke rising from the crater.
"An eruption at Grimsvoetn has started and there's an aeroplane on its way there now to investigate further," Eirkisson said.
"There was a cloud rising up from Grimsvoetn around (0500 AEST) and at just before (0600 AEST) it had reached an altitude of 11 kilometres."
Grimsvoetn is Iceland's most active volcano, having erupted nine times between 1922 and 2004. It lies beneath the Vatnajoekull glacier in the southeast of the island nation.
The eruption in April last year of Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano, southwest of Grimsvoetn, shut down large swathes of European airspace for almost a month amid fears the volcanic ash could wreak havoc on aircraft engines.
No two volcanic eruptions are the same, and it remained unclear if the new eruption threatened to emit a similar kind of ash - fine, with very sharp particles - like the massive plume that burst from Eyjafjoell.
The problem with last year's eruption, according to the researchers, was that it happened under a glacier, bursting through 200-300 metres of ice.
It was the "interaction between the cold water and the hot magma that made the particles really tiny," and therefore especially dangerous to aircraft, Susan Stipp, a professor at the Nano-Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen, told AFP late last month.
Grimsvoetn is however also located under a glacier, in an enormous, eight-kilometre diametre caldera -- a collapsed volcanic crater -- near the centre of the Vatnajoekull icefield.
When it last erupted in November 2004, volcanic ash fell as far away as mainland Europe and caused some disruptions in flights to and from Iceland.
Geologists had worried late last year the volcano was about to blow when they noticed a large river run caused by rapidly melting glacier ice.
Eruptions at Grimsvoetn traditionally result in massive flooding, although this has little impact since the surrounding areas are uninhabited.
Last year's Eyjafjallajokul eruption left some 10 millions of air travellers stranded after winds pushed the ash cloud toward some of the world's busiest airspace and led most northern European countries to ground all planes for five days.
Whether widespread disruption occurs again will depend on how long the eruption lasts, how high the ash plume rises and which way the wind blows.
Iceland's Meteorological Office confirmed that an eruption had begun on Saturday at the Grimsvotn volcano, accompanied by a series of small earthquakes.
Meteorological spokesman Haraldur Eirkisson reported a tall plume of smoke rising from the crater.
"An eruption at Grimsvoetn has started and there's an aeroplane on its way there now to investigate further," Eirkisson said.
"There was a cloud rising up from Grimsvoetn around (0500 AEST) and at just before (0600 AEST) it had reached an altitude of 11 kilometres."
Grimsvoetn is Iceland's most active volcano, having erupted nine times between 1922 and 2004. It lies beneath the Vatnajoekull glacier in the southeast of the island nation.
The eruption in April last year of Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano, southwest of Grimsvoetn, shut down large swathes of European airspace for almost a month amid fears the volcanic ash could wreak havoc on aircraft engines.
No two volcanic eruptions are the same, and it remained unclear if the new eruption threatened to emit a similar kind of ash - fine, with very sharp particles - like the massive plume that burst from Eyjafjoell.
The problem with last year's eruption, according to the researchers, was that it happened under a glacier, bursting through 200-300 metres of ice.
It was the "interaction between the cold water and the hot magma that made the particles really tiny," and therefore especially dangerous to aircraft, Susan Stipp, a professor at the Nano-Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen, told AFP late last month.
Grimsvoetn is however also located under a glacier, in an enormous, eight-kilometre diametre caldera -- a collapsed volcanic crater -- near the centre of the Vatnajoekull icefield.
When it last erupted in November 2004, volcanic ash fell as far away as mainland Europe and caused some disruptions in flights to and from Iceland.
Eruptions at Grimsvoetn traditionally result in massive flooding, although this has little impact since the surrounding areas are uninhabited.
Last year's Eyjafjallajokul eruption left some 10 millions of air travellers stranded after winds pushed the ash cloud toward some of the world's busiest airspace and led most northern European countries to ground all planes for five days.
Whether widespread disruption occurs again will depend on how long the eruption lasts, how high the ash plume rises and which way the wind blows.
