This was indicated by the more than 100 medium and light earthquakes on a few days and, above all, the emission of large amounts of sulfur dioxide, the state TV broadcaster RTVE reported on Wednesday.
In addition, the terrain around the volcano had been pushed up by ten centimeters, said the volcanologist Ramón Ortíz of the newspaper “La Vanguardia”. «The magma is pushing upwards. It presses until the earth’s crust breaks and lava flows out. “
The volcano in Cumbre Vieja also presented spectacular images of violent eruptions more than five weeks after the eruption began, throwing magma and rocks hundreds of meters into the air. Orange-hot lava continued to roll downhill towards the sea.
However, it hardly caused any new damage, as it flowed over the lava that had already leaked and has now cooled down somewhat. Also, the various streams hardly made any headway towards the sea, but new lava pushed up on old one, and in some cases the layer was up to 30 meters high. A total of 908 hectares were covered with lava, which corresponds to more than 1200 football fields.
In the best-case scenario, the eruption will continue until the pressure under the volcano has dropped sufficiently, said the volcanologist Vicente Soler from the Spanish research institute CSIC. It would be worse if a new volcanic vent opened further away from the previous volcano, new lava flows flow on the other side of the island towards the sea and the traffic connections between the north and south of the island were completely interrupted. “That is very unlikely, but not impossible,” warned Soler.
The volcano erupted on September 19 for the first time in 50 years. Since then, around 7,000 people have had to leave their homes, more than 2,100 buildings have been destroyed and major damage has been done to agriculture, especially the banana plantations.