La Palma volcano devastates island with ash as seismic activity intensifies

Two months into the eruption of Cumbre Vieja, the volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma has reshaped the landscape entirely. Lava has consumed more than a thousand hectares. Ash falls like snow, burying houses whole, filling cemeteries, covering playgrounds and patios and the possessions people left behind when they fled. Seven thousand residents have been evacuated. No one has died, but the island itself is being erased.

The photographs tell the story in fragments. A marble cross in a graveyard, only its top visible above the gray. A swing set buried to its chains. A house reduced to a dark rectangle beneath a mountain of ash. One woman, Cristina Vera, stood in what used to be her neighborhood and wept. "I don't recognize my house," she said. "I don't recognize anything around it. Not the neighbors' homes, not even the mountain. Everything changed so much I don't know where I am."

What concerns scientists now is what lies beneath. In the past twenty-four hours, seismic activity at depths greater than twenty kilometers has intensified both in frequency and in strength—the highest number of recorded earthquakes at that depth since the eruption began. María José Blanco, director of Spain's National Geographic Institute in the Canary Islands and spokesperson for the scientific committee monitoring the volcano, reported this at a press conference. Early that morning, at 3:37 a.m., a magnitude 5.0 earthquake struck thirty-six kilometers down and was felt across the island with intensity levels reaching four to five on the European scale. More tremors, she warned, are likely in the coming days or weeks, possibly reaching intensity levels of five or six.

But the relationship between deeper earthquakes and the eruption itself remains opaque. Blanco was careful not to overstate what the data shows. There is no model that directly links increased seismic activity to a surge in volcanic output. Sometimes, in other eruptions, scientists have observed that earthquakes precede an uptick in lava flow or gas emissions. Sometimes they do not. "It is neither easy nor obvious to establish that connection," she said. The volcano operates by its own logic, one that science can measure but not yet fully predict.

The volcano continues to emit. Sulfur dioxide pours from the vent at thirteen to fifteen thousand tons per day—still high, though down from the peak of fifty thousand tons daily recorded in late September. Carbon dioxide emissions from the broader volcanic system range between eighteen hundred and nineteen hundred tons daily. These diffuse emissions pose no direct threat to residents, but the air quality in some areas remains compromised. In the town of Puntagorda, levels stayed poor enough yesterday to trigger an air quality alert. Elsewhere on the island, conditions are good to moderate.

The lava itself continues its slow advance. A second delta—a fan of cooled lava spreading into the ocean—is expanding perpendicular to the coastline, overlapping with the first. The eruptive column measured this morning reached twenty-five hundred meters high. The cone itself has held steady at eleven hundred thirty-one meters for days now. Wind from the east continues to push the ash plume west and southwest, which is fortunate for air traffic; planes can still operate.

Seven thousand people are gone from their homes. Their houses are still there, most of them, buried under ash or surrounded by it. The island waits to see what the volcano does next.