AFP, published on Friday 09 December 2022 at 04:34
It is a unique experience in the world: visitors can get close to a real molten lava flow in a performance hall in the city center of the Icelandic capital.
In the midst of a cinema-like auditorium with retractable seats stands a structure lined with basalt columns, reminiscent of the organs at Reynisfjara, a very popular black-sand beach in southern Iceland.
Around forty visitors, the vast majority of whom are tourists, settled there.
“It’s the show where you intentionally see real molten lava flowing inside a building,” begins the show’s Scottish host Iain MacKinnon.
After a few minutes on the genesis of the project and Icelandic volcanology, a documentary traces the most significant volcanic eruptions since the island was settled at the end of the 9th century.
Then comes the long-awaited announcement: “It’s been almost 5,000 years since lava flowed in Reykjavik…until now”.
– Mesmerized viewers –
The glowing lava then descends a steel slope surrounded by black sand, illuminating the space like a sunrise. It’s the blast furnace that forces viewers to drop their jackets. At the end of the race, the molten liquid sizzles on contact with blocks of ice and crackles as it cools with the sound of breaking glass.
“It was really beautiful,” Jasmine Luong, a 28-year-old Australian from Melbourne, told AFP. “I understand why a lot of people are drawn to an eruption, but of course you can’t get that close in a normal natural environment, while it’s much safer here.”
If hundreds of thousands of curious people watched the mesmerizing spectacle of bubbling rivers around Mount Fagradalsfjall about forty kilometers from Reykjavik last August and the year before, not all Icelandic volcanic eruptions are so peaceful.
Although the characteristic smell of lava is present throughout the show, heating it multiple times has rid it of its toxic gases, allowing the audience to get closer than it actually is.
“People who go to an outbreak site when they first get there and find it, there’s a ‘wow’ factor. We have the same effect here,” MacKinnon said.
In order for real lava to flow into the room, 600 kilograms of tephra, those rock fragments ejected in an eruption, were recovered near Katla, one of the most dangerous volcanoes in Iceland (south), whose last revival dates back to 1918.
“We heat it up to its melting point, which is around 1,100 degrees Celsius. Then it melts. And we pour it into space,” explains Júlíus Jónsson, co-founder with his wife of the Lava Show, which has been attracting curious onlookers in Vik, an architectural tourist town in the south of the island, since 2018 before also settling in the country’s capital.
A huge metal-melting furnace, modified for the needs of the show, sits next to the room and runs on methane.
The idea for these performances came from the top of a glacier while watching the lava eruptions at Fimmvörduháls, the gentle eruption that preceded the more violent Eyjafjallajökull eruption of 2010 that paralyzed air travel.
The North Atlantic island is one of the most active and productive volcanic regions on earth and has an eruption every five years on average.
“We thought it would be wonderful for Iceland if the lava flowed all the time,” dreams its creator.