(Reykjavik) This is a unique experience in the world: visitors can approach a real flow of molten lava in a performance hall in the city center of the Icelandic capital.
In the middle of an auditorium arranged like a movie theater with retractable seats, stands a structure lined with basalt columns reminiscent of the organs of Reynisfjara, a very popular black sand beach in southern Iceland.
Around forty visitors, the overwhelming majority of whom are tourists, settled there.
“This is the show where you experience real molten lava flowing inside a building, intentionally,” begins the show’s Scottish presenter, Iain MacKinnon.
After a few minutes on the genesis of the project and Icelandic volcanology, a documentary retraces the most significant volcanic eruptions since the colonization of the island at the end of the 9th century.
Then comes the long-awaited announcement: “It’s been almost 5000 years since lava flowed in Reykjavik… Until now”.
Hypnotized spectators
The incandescent lava then descends a steel slope surrounded by black sand and illuminates the room like a sunrise. It’s the furnace, forcing the spectators to drop the jacket. At the end of the race, the molten liquid sizzles at the touch of blocks of ice and crackles with the sound of breaking glass as it cools.
“It was really beautiful,” Jasmine Luong, a 28-year-old Australian from Melbourne, told AFP. “I understand why a lot of people would be attracted to an eruption, but obviously you couldn’t get that close in normal natural surroundings, whereas here it’s much safer.”
If hundreds of thousands of curious people were able to witness the mesmerizing spectacle of bubbling flows around Mount Fagradalsfjall last August and the year before about forty kilometers from Reykjavik, not all Icelandic volcanic eruptions are so peaceful.
Although the characteristic smell of lava is present during the show, its multiple heating has rid it of its toxic gases, allowing the public to approach closer than in reality.
“People who go to the site of an eruption, when they first get there and see it, there’s a ‘wow effect’. We have the same effect here,” says MacKinnon.
For real lava to flow into the room, 600 kilograms of tephra, these fragments of rock ejected during an eruption, were recovered near Katla, one of the most dangerous volcanoes in Iceland (south) whose the last revival dates back to 1918.
“We heat it to its melting point, which is around 1100 degrees Celsius. Then it melts. And we pour it into the room, ”explains Júlíus Jónsson, co-founder with his wife of the Lava Show, which since 2018 has been attracting the curious to Vik, an architectural tourist town in the south of the island, before also settling in the capital. from the country.
A huge furnace used to melt metal, modified for the needs of the show, is adjacent to the room and fueled with methane.
The idea for these performances came from the top of a glacier, observing the lava outpourings at Fimmvörduháls, the gentle eruption that preceded the more violent one from Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, which paralyzed air traffic.
The North Atlantic island is one of Earth’s most active and productive volcanic regions and has an eruption on average every five years.
“We thought it would be wonderful for Iceland if the lava flowed all the time”, dreams its creator.