[Rockhounds] This is What Happens When You Fly a Drone Into a Volcano

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Photographer Garðar Ólafs — and founder of the Iceland-based stock agency
Airstock <https://airstock.is/> — recently took his DJI drone to the skies
above the erupting Geldingadalir volcano and may have gotten a little bit
too close.

The Geldingadalir volcano which is currently erupting about 15 minutes from
Ólafs’s home town of Reykjanes.

“It’s a special feeling having an erupting volcano 15 minutes from my
home,” Ólafs writes on Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/gardarolafsphotography/>. “Reykjanes has always
been an underestimated part of Iceland, but today it’s probably the most
known part, funny how things can change in one night.”

Ólafs and his brother Oli Haukur have been shooting a lot of drone content
over the last five years in Iceland and thought it would be a good idea to
list the footage instead of leaving it on hard drives to languish
unappreciated. Instead of working with established stock agencies, they
decided to start their own agency and have since sold some footage to
Netflix, Apple, BBC, and others. Some of the footage
<https://airstock.is/collections/aurora-drone-footage/>, including the
shots of the Geldingadalir volcano
<https://airstock.is/footage/geldingadalur-eruption-iceland-id-43222298/>
below,
are available nowhere else.

Ólafs tells *PetaPixel* that he was flying his drone around the eruption,
capturing photos and videos, when he decided to try a shot looking straight
down into the mouth of the fissure.

https://petapixel.com/2021/03/26/this-is-what-happens-when-you-fly-a-drone-into-a-volcano/