New photos and footage have emerged of the northern lights putting on a show in the background as a volcano erupts in the foreground.
The images, shot on March 23 and 24, come from Iceland, where the Sundhnúkur eruptions are ongoing close to Grindavik on the Reykjanes Peninsula.
The image above was taken by Marco Di Marco, an Italian photographer who runs the Volcano Chaser website. He was taking photos and videos on assignment for Associated Press, which allowed him to access the site. The area around the volcano is closed to the public, so there’s no way of replicating any of these photos.
Exploding Sky
On his Instagram account, he posted a series of images of the aurora and the volcano erupting. “I tried to get a similar shot for years,” he wrote. The sky exploded just a few minutes after we arrived, so we sent the drones out to get a decent composition.” He added that it’s very complicated to expose a photograph that can capture the different intensities of light, with the lava far brighter than the aurora.
The aurora are caused by the solar wind, charged particles from the sun, being accelerated down the field lines of the Earth’s magnetic field. Green lights are caused by the charged particles colliding with oxygen molecules, while nitrogen molecules cause the other colors. They occur in Earth’s ionosphere hundreds of miles up.
Award-winning Belgian Icelandic photographer Jeroen Van Nieuwenhove, also on assignment at Sundhnúksgígar, took this image of the erupting volcano with the aurora in the background.
Time-Lapse Video
However, perhaps the highlight is Di Marco’s timelapse video of the event, shot on March 24, that captured the aurora caused by the massive solar flare unleashed by the sun on March 23 and the resulting coronal mass ejection. A CME is a cloud of magnetic fields and charged particles from the sun that streams into space at up to 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) per second.
It was “a bit too early to display great aurora at the right time in Europe,” wrote Marco. “We witnessed just the end of the geomagnetic storm right after twilight.
Another photographer, Ingibergur Thor, took this image of the eruption and the aurora along with Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon in the foreground.
The sun is currently nearing the peak of Solar Cycle 25, which is proving to be much stronger than the last one. A solar cycle lasts roughly 11 years.
Aurora Season
The spectacular photos are unlikely to be repeated because “aurora season” is drawing to a close. That’s because we’re now past the equinox, so the length of the day in far northern latitudes—such as Iceland—is rapidly lengthening. So, although the aurora borealis is regularly present, it won’t be seen nearly as easily. By June, there will be a midnight sun in Iceland and other locations on or in the Arctic Circle.
Aurora typically occurs in an oval around the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. However, it times of high magnetic activity—such as right now— the Northern Lights (aurora borealis) can be seen as far south as the Midwest U.S. states, Scotland and Wales in the U.K and Japan, and the Southern Lights (aurora australis) in New Zealand, Tasmania and southern Australia.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
