Watch Workers Desperately Try to Stop Oncoming Lava

This is wild.

Whole Lotta Lava

Locals in Grindavik, a town southwest of Iceland's capital Reykjavík, really can't catch a break. This afternoon, massive flows of burning lava engulfed a road, following a third volcanic eruption in the area over the last couple of months.

Footage shows the natural spectacle unfolding with construction workers desperately trying to save existing infrastructure until the very last minute.

One video making the rounds on Reddit shows a worker inside a backhoe desperately spreading what appears to be a mound of dirt, to (presumably?) stop the quickly-approaching lava from destroying the rest of the country road — but likely, to no avail, considering the sheer amount of incoming lava.

Volcanic Shock

The situation is so dire that the Blue Lagoon spa, one of Iceland's biggest tourist attractions — which you may know from nearly everyone who's ever been to Iceland's vacation Instagram post — had to be evacuated on Thursday. Fortunately, Grindavik, which is roughly 2.5 miles southwest of the eruption site, has been long evacuated already. The town was cleared out following the first major eruption on December 18. A second eruption just under a month later had lava slowly approaching the town itself, with locals constructing defensive walls.

Despite their best efforts, several buildings have since been consumed by the lava. Per the Associated Press, the entire town has sunk by 4.5 feet due to magma movement.

While there haven't been any reported deaths, a man went missing in mid-January after reportedly falling into a crevasse while trying to fill it.

Unfortunately, according to experts, the situation is far from over.

"I think at the moment there is the resignation, the stoical resignation, that, for the foreseeable future, the town is basically uninhabitable," volcanologist Davie McGarvie told the AP.

"It’s been a bit of a shock that it has come back to life," he said, adding that "eruptions could go on for decades, if not centuries, sporadically in this particular peninsula."

More on Iceland: NASA Images Show Huge Fissure Opening Up in Iceland