Iceland is in a holding pattern as it awaits a volcanic eruption

Iceland is strengthening a power plant that provides electricity and hot water to about 30,000 people and continues to let residents of the evacuated city most at risk enter one by one and collect personal belongings as the country waits for a possible volcanic eruption.

The work on the power plant is a preventive measure to protect Iceland’s infrastructure and is being carried out 24 hours a day, said Jon Phor Viglundsson, spokesperson for the Icelandic Ministry of Civil Protection and Emergency Management.

It would take about 30 days to reinforce the entire plant, Mr. Viglundsson said. It is unclear how much of the plant has already been protected, but “development is progressing,” he added.

The factory is a “huge infrastructure that we must protect at all costs,” Mr. Viglundsson said.

A holding pattern

Whether and when a volcanic eruption may occur is unclear and difficult to predict.

Since the end of October, tens of thousands of earthquakes have been reported on the Reykjanes Peninsula, in the southwest of the country. At one point there were as many as 1,400 in one 24-hour period, and in recent days many hundreds more. A 15-kilometer-long underground river of magma moves into the ocean beneath Grindavik, the evacuated city.

This week, officials said the intensity of the seismic activity had decreased slightly, but they continued to warn of a possible eruption. Seismic activity along the subsurface magma has continued.

As of Friday the Icelandic Met Office websitethe country’s weather service, continued to warn that there was “a significant chance of a volcanic eruption in the coming days,” as it has done for several days.

“We have to wait,” Mr. Viglundsson said. “We can’t do anything else.”

An eruption would be a very local event.

While the eruption could be large, it is a very localized event, officials say. Last Saturday, officials evacuated more than 3,000 residents of Grindavik, a small fishing village about 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of Reykjavik. Since then, residents have been slowly allowed to collect some of their personal belongings again, with the help of emergency workers who accompany them.

“It’s a precarious area to live in,” Mr. Viglundsson said.

No other towns have been evacuated and there are no farms or smaller villages in the area around Grindavik. But the popular geothermal spa of the Blue Lagoon near Reykjavik has closed until the end of the month as a precaution against a possible eruption and due to the disruption caused by the many earthquakes.

Iceland has fewer than 400,000 inhabitants and about 130 volcanoes, most of which are active. The country lies on two tectonic plates, which are in turn separated by an undersea mountain range from which molten hot rocks, or magma, flow. Earthquakes occur when magma pushes through the plates.

Another ash cloud?

The question many people are asking is whether this will have similar consequences as in 2010, when the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano caused a large ash cloud that disrupted air traffic in Europe.

Scientists are closely monitoring the situation, officials said, but it is difficult to know where the eruption would start, if and when it does. One possibility is that the volcano erupts beneath the ocean floor, shooting a lot of ash into the atmosphere. But scientists say the chances of that happening have become smaller.

This time it seems unlikely that the disruptions will be as intense. As of Friday morning, there has been no disruption to air traffic and flights to and from Reykjavik Airport have been operating uninterrupted.

Mr Viglundsson, the government spokesman, said that while there was a possibility of air traffic disruption, this was “not very likely”.