On the twenty-day anniversary of its eruption, the Cumbre Vieja volcano overflowed the island of La Palma for the first time this Friday, as the ash cloud spread to Tenerife and interrupted operations at the Los Rodeos airport, thus affecting the air traffic of all the Canary Islands.
Since the morning, the airlines gave up operating in Tenerife North due to the presence of ash, despite the fact that AENA kept the runways operational, and diverted their flights to Tenerife South or directly delayed the links, waiting for some improvement.
This improvement occurred early in the afternoon, when the airline company Binter resumed its inter-island flights in Tenerife North and reinforced connections due to the accumulation of passengers in the terminal.
However, from Santa Cruz de La Palma the committee of the Canary Islands Volcanic Emergency Plan (Pevolca) warned that the ashes could spread in the afternoon to the Tenerife South airport and at night to La Gomera, before the improvement in the wind regime expected for tomorrow.
The change in the direction of the wind, which is expected to blow from the north as of Saturday, would clear the atmosphere of ash and would also increase the quality of the air breathed in the Aridane Valley, classified as “regular”.
In any case, on the island of La Palma, air connections have not been recovered because its airport has been inoperative since Wednesday afternoon, while AENA is trying to clear the runway of ash.
Beyond the effects of ash and sulfur dioxide on air quality and air transport, the volcanic eruption has not undergone major changes in recent hours, in which it remains in a phase of stability, marked by the continuity of emissions from three sources in the crater of the volcano and one in the slope that lead the magma to the sea through the main flow.
To the south of that main stream, a fork broke off Wednesday afternoon that runs through agricultural estates in the direction of the sea, from where it is still some 150 meters away.
And from the main stream, lava continues to enter the ocean, where a delta or fajana has formed that advances to the limit of the insular platform, from which the greater depth could generate a landslide on its front that, in turn, could cause sudden release of gases, hydromagmatic explosions and waves.
Most of the parameters that are monitored for the follow-up of the volcanic eruption corroborate the stable phase or “valley” of the volcano. But that can change from one day to the next, as the scientists repeat.
Among these parameters, only seismicity has continued to increase in number and intensity, but earthquakes remain at great depth, more than 10 kilometers, which makes Pevolca think that the possibility of a new eruptive center away from the main cone is, for the moment, “very scarce”.
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