\A cloud of smoke and ash is seen over the Grimsvoetn volcano in Iceland on Saturday. Volcanic ash was expected to reach Germany's North Sea coast Tuesday, forecasters said, citing information from the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre at Britain's Met Office. Photo: AFP 
 

Activity at Iceland's erupting volcano has slowed and the flight-halting ash plume shrunk overnight from its peak of 20 kilometers to between three and five kilometers, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said Tuesday.

"The activity has reduced. It's much less strong than on the first day," on Saturday, Olof Baldursdottir, a spokeswoman for the agency, told AFP.

"The plume is lower than it has been. It was seven to eight kilometers last evening, but during the night it went down to three to five kilometers," she said, stressing though that the decline was in part due to "strong winds that affect the plume."

Strong low-altitude northerly winds were still pushing the cloud of ash southward, she added.

The ash Tuesday blew over Norway's southwestern towns of Karmoey and Stavanger before heading back out to sea, the country's airport operator Avinor said.

In Denmark, a small zone of airspace in the northwest over the North Sea was closed, but no real impact on air traffic was felt, said Jan Eliassen, a spokesman for Danish air traffic control Naviair.

"According to the last estimates, the ash is of such a density that we thought it necessary to close a small part of Danish airspace over the North Sea, but it will not affect (air) traffic," said Jan Eliassen, a spokesman for Danish air traffic control Naviair.

Meanwhile, hundreds of flights, especially around Scotland, were cancelled as the ash blew over Britain, although experts insisted that the disruption to air travel would not match last year's peak, when more than 100,000 flights were cancelled and eight million passengers stranded.

Two flights were cancelled Tuesday morning at Copenhagen's airport, one bound for Aberdeen in Scotland and the other for Kangerlussuaq in Greenland.

Baldursdottir meanwhile said it remained "very difficult to predict" when the eruption would end.
Grimsvoetn is Iceland's most active volcano, having erupted nine times between 1922 and 2004.

Baldursdottir however pointed out that the same volcano erupted for seven months in 1873, but stressed that for most of that period it was a "low-intensity" eruption.

AFP