Reykjavik - There has been no activity at Iceland's Grimsvoetn volcano since 02.00 GMT and its flight-halting ash plume has almost disappeared, a geologist at the Icelandic Meteorological Office said on Wednesday.
“There has been no activity since about 02.00 GMT this morning,” Sigthrudur Armannsdottir told AFP, stressing though that “it's too soon to say the eruption is (completely) over.”
“The plume has practically disappeared,” she said, adding that experts were en route to the volcano to gather more information, which should be available by early afternoon.
Urdur Gunnarsdottir, a spokeswoman for Iceland's civil crisis management agency, also told AFP there for now were “no seismic tremors” at the volcano, but insisted “I don't think we want to pronounce it dead until it's dead.”
Iceland's most active volcano, located at the heart of its biggest glacier, Vatnajoekull, in the south-east, began erupting on Saturday, spewing a column of smoke and ash as high as 20 kilometres into the air.
It was the most powerful eruption start in a century at Grimsvoetn, which erupted nine times between 1922 and 2004, sparking fears that the volcano's usually short-lived blasts would be more drawn-out this time.
However, the plume quickly declined, dropping to between 10 and 15 kilometres on Sunday, to around five on Tuesday morning and down to just two kilometres by Tuesday evening, according to official measurements.
Bjoern Oddsson, a geologist at the University of Iceland, told AFP Wednesday that overnight there had still been a plume of about one kilometre over the volcano, but “of only steam, because it will produce steam for a couple of days after it's over.”
Ash however continues to billow around in the atmosphere, briefly closing Iceland's main airport overnight to Wednesday and causing disruptions to some air travel in Europe, especially Germany, which saw large airspace closures and an expected 700 flight cancellations.
But that ash, Oddsson explained, “is something that was produced one or two days ago.”
Just over a year ago, ash spewing from another volcano, Eyjafjoell, caused the biggest aerial shutdown in Europe since World War II, affecting more than 100 000 flights and eight million passengers.
Eyjafjoell's plume however never exceeded 10 kilometres, and experts in Iceland have reportedly calculated that Grimsvoetn spewed out more ash into the atmosphere in the first 24 hours of its eruption than the nearby volcano did in the space of 40 days. - Sapa-AFP