Photo: Galapagos National Park / EFE
Quito – The eruption at the Wolf volcano, of the Ecuadorian archipelago of Galapagos, continues, Gas emission columns and thermal anomalies associated with lava flows have been registered, reported this Saturday the Geophysical Institute of the National Polytechnic School.
In a report published on its social networks, it indicated that the Washington VAAC reported four emissions, mainly gas, with average heights of 1,300 meters and heading west.
He added that the MIROVA satellite system reported two extreme thermal anomalies in Wolf, mainly associated with lava flows and that the FIRMS system registered more than one hundred “thermal alerts during the last 12 hours”.
Sources from the Galapagos National Park told Efe that a flyby is planned this Saturday afternoon over the Wolf volcano area, where the pink iguanas, unique in the world, live.
The volcano erupted at dawn on Friday and the first official reports indicated that the pink iguanas’ living area was far from the eruption zone and the impact zone of the Wolf volcano.
Therefore, the Directorate of the Galapagos National Park (DPNG) did not consider taking additional measures to protect pink iguanas.
The eruption of the Wolf volcano, in the north of Isabela Island, was witnessed by park rangers who were near the area carrying out different activities to manage the protected area, as well as tour operators who were navigating the surroundings.
Danny Rueda, director of the PNG, said that in their flyby on Friday they found that the lava flow was heading south of the crater of the Wolf volcano.
“This means that our emblematic populations such as turtles, land iguanas and mainly the pink iguana, are out of the lava flow that could affect their population in any way,” he said on Friday.
According to the Geophysical Institute, it is a fissure to the south of the volcano where the magma is emerging in the same direction, towards the interior of the island.
On Friday, the columns of smoke and ash reached several thousand meters high (between 1,900 and 3,800 meters) and headed towards the north of the island, where there is no human population at risk.
The first record of a volcano eruption was in 1797.
El Wolf is the highest volcano in the archipelago, at 1,707 meters above sea level and one of the five active volcanoes on Isabela Island, along with Sierra Negra, Cerro Azul, Alcedo and Darwin.
The archipelago is located about a thousand kilometers from the Ecuadorian continental coasts and it was declared in 1978 as a Natural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco.
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