Fire meets ice in Iceland - level 3
Where ice and fire meet. Lava pours out of Iceland’s Bardarbunga Volcano almost five months after its eruption began back in August.
The impressive Holuhraun Lava Field cuts a swathe across the North Atlantic island of 190 kilometers long and up to 25 kilometers wide, with Iceland's Met Office reporting small earthquakes in the area every day.
It is Iceland's largest flow since the Laki eruption in 1783 with lava flowing over the last few weeks at an estimated 50 to 70 cubic meters per second. And with high values of toxic sulfuric dioxide still being recorded, tourists and hikers are being kept away from this extreme landscape with local villages prepared for evacuations if the gases or lava spread.
Difficult words: impressive (amazing), lava (very hot liquid rock), swathe (a broad strip of something), Met (meteorological which relates to weather), earthquake (the shaking of the earth), estimated (calculated), value (level), toxic (deadly).