The ongoing eruption on La Palma has released as much energy to date as the electricity that the entire Canary Islands would consume over 36 years.
The Volcanological Institute of the Canary Islands (Involcán) has published this Wednesday on its Facebook profile an estimate of the energy associated with the eruptive process of Cumbre Vieja: 286.2 terawatt hours.
That figure, he specifies, is equivalent to 35.9 times the electricity demand of the Canary Islands during 2020 and 1,158 times the electricity consumption of the island of La Palma last year.
La Palma’s eruption is about to turn two months old. It began at 3:13 p.m. on September 19, but the island had already felt its effects a week earlier, in the form of hundreds of small earthquakes generated by magma as it advanced towards the surface.
117 earthquakes located on La Palma, with a maximum magnitude of 4.7
The National Geographic Institute (IGN) has located during the first hours of this Wednesday 117 seismic movements on the Canary Island of La Palma, which in one case reached magnitude 4.6, at 7.17 am, under the municipality of Mazo and 35 kilometers deep, with intensity III-IV.
Of the 115 earthquakes located during the early hours of this Wednesday in La Palma, 80 have occurred in Fuencaliente, 35 in Mazo, in Santa Cruz de La Palma, and 1 in El Paso, the latter municipality where on September 19 the volcanic eruption in the Cumbre Vieja system.
Only during the first hour of this Wednesday the National Geographic Institute located 12 earthquakes in Fuencaliente and 3 in Mazo, the first of them at 00.01 of magnitude 3, 11 kilometers deep under Fuencaliente.
The depths at which these 117 seismic movements have been located have ranged from 7 kilometers, on one occasion, to 37.
The last of the seismic movements located so far occurred at 8.14 hours in Mazo, of magnitude 2.8 and 12 kilometers deep.
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