AFP

Tens of thousands of people have braved a steep, rugged trail in Iceland to catch a rare glimpse of an active volcano after it erupted last week, spewing red-hot lava into the sky.  

Tourism officials said Thursday that almost 23,000 people had made the difficult, hours-long trek to spot the volcano in the Meradalir valley, just 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the capital. 

“We’ve been here for three, four hours and we never get tired of it, it’s always moving”, said Jean-Paul Couturier, a French pensioner on vacation in Iceland.

The hike to the newly-formed crater is a 14 kilometres round-trip across tough terrain, with a 300-metre (985-foot) ascent. The walk takes about two hours from the nearest car park.

Strong winds and rain have done little to deter crowds.

On Wednesday alone — when authorities reopened the site following a three-day closure — more than 4,600 people took in the mesmerising views of the red-hot magma. 

The volcano is located in the Meradalir valley, an uninhabited area that would normally not attract more than a few visitors.

Known as the land of fire and ice, Iceland has 32 volcanic systems currently considered active, the highest number in Europe. It had an eruption every five years on average.

The latest volcano erupted in the Meradalir valley on August 3 and has continued at a fairly stable rate since, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said. 

– ‘Nature’s power’ –

“It would be very easy for it to last as long as the previous one”, vulcanologist Thorvaldur Thordarson told AFP.

Last year, lava spewed from the nearby Mount Fagradalsfjall volcano for six months, the longest eruption in Iceland in more than 50 years.

Hikers making the trek on Wednesday were well-equipped with walking sticks, hiking boots and rain gear. 

It was a sharp contrast from the shorts and flip flops worn by some of the first curious onlookers who initially rushed to the scene. 

Observers watch from a safe distance the red-orange lava fountains spurting as high as 70 meters before falling back to the ground, forming a large blanket of magma and a volcanic semi-cone as it solidified.

The lava reaches temperatures of 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,192 Fahrenheit), the hottest lava produced on Earth, and has so far flowed almost two kilometres to the south across the valley.

“The hot rock shooting out of the earth is really the first most impressive thing that you see,” American tourist James Maniscalco said.

For French tourist Clemence Ernoult, the experience was as rare as it gets. 

“You really see Nature’s power,” she said.  

“It’s something you’ll probably only see once in your life”.

South Korea’s capital has moved to ban the cramped basement flats made famous by Oscar-winning movie “Parasite” after four people drowned in subterranean dwellings during flooding caused by record-breaking rains this week.

Soldiers and relief workers were clearing debris Thursday from waterlogged, mud-covered homes in Gwanak district, an AFP reporter saw, where three tenants, including a disabled woman and a teenager, died Monday.

Their deaths — trapped by floodwater in their basement apartment — have caused public outrage, with President Yoon Suk-yeol visiting their destroyed home this week before calling on officials to do more to help the poor and vulnerable during natural disasters.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government has announced they want to get rid of tiny, cramped basement flats — known as “banjiha” — which are typically cheap to rent but prone to damp and flooding.

Around 200,000 households live in such flats, which make up around five percent of housing stock in the South Korean capital, according to official figures.

Seoul said in a press release Wednesday that it will stop issuing permits to construct such homes, while pushing to gradually phase out existing basement and semi-basement flats.

The city plans to begin discussions with the national government to ban the use of basements or semi-basement spaces for residential purposes, it added.

Four out of 11 people killed in this week’s record downpours drowned after their basement flats were inundated with floodwater, officials have said.

Such abodes received global attention due to Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite”, which won the 2020 Best Picture Oscar and features a poor family living in a dank basement home.

Activists blamed the “banjiha” deaths this week on the government’s housing policies, saying they were preventable disasters.

“We condemn the government’s negligence regarding those marginalised people in this housing,” said the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice in a statement.

“As rainfall becomes stronger and more frequent under the influence of climate change, (Seoul) must embark on a fundamental change of its approach to basement residents,” it added.

Yoon has also blamed climate change for the rains and flooding, which he said were the worst since weather records began over a century ago.

“Those who struggle financially or with physical difficulties are bound to be more vulnerable to natural disasters,” he said.

Officials warned Thursday that flare-ups could cause a massive wildfire to further spread in France’s parched southwest, site of the most intense blazes that have blackened swaths of the country this week.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne was to meet with authorities battling the Landiras fire south of Bordeaux, and further reinforcements are expected for the 1,100 firefighters on site, the prefecture of the Gironde department said.

France has been buffeted this summer by the historic drought that has forced water-use restrictions nationwide, as well as a series of heatwaves that experts say are being driven by climate change.

“Conditions are particularly difficult: the vegetation and soil are exceptionally dry,” the prefecture said in a statement, warning that extreme dry heat is likely until at least Sunday.

“There is a very serious risk of new outbreaks.”

Temperatures in the region could top 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) on Thursday, weather forecasters predicted.

The Landiras blaze erupted in July — the driest month seen in France since 1961 — destroying 14,000 hectares and forcing thousands of people to evacuate before it was contained.

But it continued to smoulder in the tinder-dry pine forests and peat-rich soil, and officials suspect arson may have played a role in the latest flare-up, which has burned 6,800 hectares (17,000 acres) since Tuesday.  

Currently eight major wildfires are raging in France and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who was also heading to meet Gironde officials Thursday, said Sweden and Italy were sending fire-fighting aircraft to help.

President Emmanuel Macron added on Twitter that Germany, Greece, Poland, Romania and Austria are also providing help.

“Across the country over 10,000 firefighters and security forces are mobilised against the flames… These soldiers of fire are our heroes,” he said.

– ‘Battled all night’ –

“You’d think we’re in California, it’s gigantic… And they’re used to forest fires here but we’re being overwhelmed on all sides — nobody could have expected this,” Remy Lahay, a firefighter deployed near Hostens in the Landes de Gascogne natural park, told AFP. 

On several nearby houses, people hung out white sheets saying “Thank you for saving our homes” and other messages of support for the weary fire battalions.

“We battled all night to stop the fire from spreading, notably to defend the village of Belin-Beliet,” Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Mendousse of the Gironde fire and rescue service told journalists in Hostens.

Seventeen homes have been destroyed or damaged since Tuesday, and nearly 10,000 people evacuated, but no further orders to leave the area are expected “for the time being”, Mendousse said.

Acrid smoke has spread across much of the southwestern Atlantic coast and its beaches that draw huge crowds of tourists each summer, with the regional ARS health agency “strongly” urging people to wear protective face masks.

The smoke also forced the closing of the A63 motorway, a major artery toward Spain, between Bordeaux and Bayonne.

A controversy in the scientific community over recent claims anti-depressants can be ineffective at treating depression has highlighted the difficulties in understanding mental health conditions.

One of the prevailing theories currently focuses on serotonin. Depression has been linked to a lack of the molecule, which is involved in transmitting emotions to the brain. 

Claims that depression has no link to a chemical imbalance in the brain related to serotonin, casting doubt on the need for anti-depressants, have sparked fierce reaction.

A study by psychiatrists Joanna Moncrieff and Mark Horowitz in the journal Molecular Psychiatry in July concluded that there was no proven link between a lack of serotonin and depression.

The authors said it queried the underlying assumption behind the use of anti-depressants, which are mostly developed to alter serotonin levels, undoing a theory that for decades acted as a framework for research.

The study is based on several previous publications, but it quickly attracted criticism — particularly its presentation by Moncrieff, known for her scepticism towards biological explanations of depression and her radical stance against the pharmaceutical industry.

“I’m broadly in agreement with the authors’ conclusions about our current efforts, though I lack their adamantine certainty,” psychiatrist Phil Cowen said on the Science Media Centre website.

“No mental health professional” would endorse the view that a complex condition like depression “stems from a deficiency in a single neurotransmitter”, Cowen added.

– ‘Mainstream’ psychiatry –

Some peers have questioned the methodology, which measured an indirect trace of serotonin rather than taking direct measurements of the molecule.

Moncrieff, who wants to break with what she calls “mainstream” psychiatry, believes the serotonin theory still occupies an important, albeit less prominent, place in the profession.

“Even if leading psychiatrists were beginning to doubt the evidence for depression being related to low serotonin, no one told the public,” the British psychiatrist wrote on her blog.

The connection between depression and serotonin is firmly rooted in the popular imagination. French author Michel Houellebecq gave the title “Serotonin” to his 2019 novel in which the main character is depressed.

Moncrieff’s undermining of the serotonin theory to argue against current anti-depressants, going beyond the conclusions of her own study, has sparked the most vehement criticism.

Swiss psychiatrist Michel Hofmann told AFP her study was “serious” and contributed to expert debates about depression.

“But I don’t think it is an article that should have any impact in the short term on the prescription of anti-depressants,” he said.

Moncrieff has warned that anti-depressant treatment should not be suddenly interrupted. But for her, the benefits of a course of anti-depressants are doubtful if it is based on a discredited theory.

But many stress that the effectiveness of the treatments has been scientifically assessed, irrespective of the primary cause of depression.

The medicines used to treat depression “are usually many and ultimately, in most cases, we don’t know what exactly makes a treatment effective”, Hofmann added.

Debates on the role of serotonin only illustrate how difficult it is to understand the biological and social workings of an illness as complex as depression.

The challenges are forcing researchers to move away from  models that are incomplete by their very nature.

“We are still at theories and we continue to search and test models against each other,” Hofmann said.