Fissure vent

[1] Small fissure vents may not be easily discernible from the air, but the crater rows (see Laki) or the canyons (see Eldgjá) built up by some of them are.

The dikes that feed fissures reach the surface from depths of a few kilometers and connect them to deeper magma reservoirs, often under volcanic centers.

[2][3] In Iceland, volcanic vents, which can be long fissures, often open parallel to the rift zones where the Eurasian and the North American lithospheric plates are diverging, a system which is part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

[4] Renewed eruptions generally occur from new parallel fractures offset by a few hundred to thousands of metres from the earlier fissures.

[5] The Laki fissures, part of the Grímsvötn volcanic system, produced one of the biggest effusive eruptions on earth in historical times, in the form of a flood basalt of 12–14 km3 of lava in 1783.