Could Iceland’s Keflavik Airport – and Icelandic tourism - be at risk from volcanic activity?

Iceland likes to call itself 'the land of ice and fire', and that phrase has summed up its tourist appeal, which exploded with the same ferocity as the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Apr-2010.

That event brought together ice and fire to produce a huge ash cloud that shut down air travel in Europe for days, but which seemed to enrapture tourists, who have headed for the country ever since with the same enthusiasm the Vikings had for travel in the opposite direction 1,000 years ago.

Such volcanic activity is hardly new to Iceland, but its regularity has been shaken up in the last few years by a series of earthquakes and eruptions on the Reykjanes peninsula, and those are taking place again right now.

The difference now is that for the first time what has become possibly Iceland's premier tourist attraction, the Blue Lagoon, a man-made lagoon offering 'therapeutic' waters, is threatened. It is only a matter of a few kilometres from a small port town which has already been crushed by an earthquake and where some of its houses are now being devoured by the flames.

And the main gateway to the country, Keflavik International Airport, is only a few kilometres beyond that.

Tourism was Iceland's fastest growing sector before the COVID-19 pandemic - contributing 10% of GDP and employing as many as 20,000 out of a population of less than 400,000.

It is not directly threatened at this moment by this latest train of events. But with scientists talking about a new and even more unpredictable era of seismic activity, and in the worst possible place, the warnings bells should be ringing loud and clear.