A surge in seismic activity has caused Iceland to raise the aviation alert for its Bardarbunga volcano from orange to red.
"There is an ongoing eruption beneath the glacial surface, probably a small eruption which has not been able to melt the ice cap," Met Office official Theodor Hervasson said.
Code red indicates that eruptions are imminent or underway that could disperse clouds of ash and dust into the flight paths of jet aircraft, threatening safe air travel.
An eruption in 2010 of the Eyjafjallajokul volcano produced an ash cloud that caused international aviation chaos, with more than 100,000 flights cancelled.
2010: Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupts disrupting 100,000 flights Aviation regulators since have reformed policies about flying through ash, so a new eruption would be unlikely to cause that much disruption.
Thousands of mini earthquakes rattled the volcano deep beneath the Vatnajokull glacier over the past week, causing authorities to evacuate several hundred people from an area north of the glacier.
Met Office vulcanologist Melissa Pfeffer said scientists planned to fly over the glacier today to look for any changes to its surface.
Bjorn Malmquist from the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service said: "It's too early to say if flights will be disrupted.
"A small eruption started 40 minutes ago but we have yet to see how powerful it is. It will take a couple of hours for the eruption to work its way through 500m of glacial ice above. Until then there's not much we can say about the air traffic.
"As long as there is water and magma interaction there will be a lot of ash and explosions in the eruption itself, but its probably not going to be of the same kind in 2010. This will probably be more a fissure eruption, a sub-glacial eruption."
A spokeswoman for NATS, the UK's air traffic control organisation, said: "We are monitoring the situation and working in close collaboration with the Met Office, Department for Transport and our safety regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority."
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