Watch: Spectacular drone footage of long dormant Iceland volcano erupting

• Video report from ITV News reporter Martha Fairlie

A volcano that erupted in southwest Iceland on Friday has been captured spewing red hot lava by a drone.

The long dormant volcano. near the Iceland capital Reykjavík, has erupted for the first time in centuries following a series of small earthquakes in the area.

Lava was seen flowing down the volcano in two streams causing a red glow that could be seen 20 miles away.

Spectacular drone footage by Bjorn Steinbekk follows the flow up the volcano to its crater that is spewing the lava.

Volcanologists were taken by surprise at the eruption - the first in the areas for nearly 800 years - as the almost daily earthquakes that had been occurring for the past three weeks had calmed down.

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Over the past three weeks, the area has been rattled by about 50,000 small earthquakes, dozens of them magnitude 4 or stronger, the Met Office said.

The volcano is unlikely to cause the widespread disruption caused by the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in 2010 that created an ash cloud so big that flights in Europe and North America were grounded leaving millions of passengers stranded.

According to local media, the flow of lava is now subsiding.“The more we see, the smaller this eruption gets,” geophysicist Pall Einarsson said.

Iceland's Met Office added: “There is no indication of production of ash and tephra, and there is no imminent hazard for aviation.”