This image, acquired on 15 April 2010 by Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS), shows the vast cloud of volcanic ash sweeping across the UK from the eruption in Iceland, more than 1000 km away. The ash, which can be seen as the large grey streak in the image, is drifting from west to east at a height of about 11 km above the surface Earth.
An enlarged view and story follows.
It seems the Volcano has accomplished what the nutballs of “Plane Stupid” could not – shut down UK airports, including Heathrow.
Flights have been disrupted across northern Europe by volcanic ash drifting south and east from Iceland.
Airspace was closed or flights cancelled in countries including the UK, the Republic of Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and France.
The ash, which can damage aeroplane engines, was produced by a volcanic eruption under a glacier in Iceland.
Flooding was reported as the glacier melted, and up to 800 people were evacuated from the area on Wednesday.
By Thursday afternoon, the UK had shut its airspace and other countries, from Belgium to Scandinavia, were in the process of following suit.
‘Wait and see’
UK airspace was shut down to all but emergency flights from midday (1100 GMT) on Thursday to 0700 BST (0600 GMT) on Friday, at the earliest. It was also closed in Ireland.
“Volcanic ash represents a significant safety threat to aircraft,” said the UK’s Air Traffic Control Service (Nats).
Airspace closed:
Oslo airport, which is Norway’s largest, was closed on Thursday morning, meaning Norwegian airspace was completely closed.
Belgium, Sweden and Denmark announced they would be shutting their entire airspace, northern Finland was closed and the Netherlands was being closed progressively.
French aviation officials said on Thursday afternoon that the main airports in Paris and other airports in the north of the country were to be closed.
more here
Ah, how to pronounce “Eyjafjallajökull”. As I have the ogg codecs installed, I could hear the wikipedia “pronounce it”. It’s more or less like “ayeveylayevayth”. Anyone could have figured that out by reading it.
Steve in SC (14:08:46) :
This requires a massive sacrifice of virgins.
Perhaps we could borrow those dedicated and reserved for the Islamic Jihadists.
It won’t be the Scottish ones, certainly. As the old song goes:
Four and twenty virgins came down from Inverness,
And when the ball was over, there were four and twenty less.
And an epitaph:
Here lie the bones of Elizabeth Charlotte;
Born a virgin, died a harlot.
She was aye a virgin at seventeen;
A very rare thing in Aberdeen.
Hernando (10:56:22)
I follow your logic.
Basically….
Something Somewhere changes or X
It affects something else Y to a magnitude Z
X to Y times Z = Event.
Now lets feed into this elegant equation some real world details.
Kid A (X), slams a door in New York house (Y), causing the extinction of the Chinese River Dolphin (Z).
Such a useful, utilitarian equation can be applied to any situation requiring gross corruption, graft and genocide as a result.
Magnitude needs clarifying.
Magnitude table:
1. Transfer a million $US to an NGO, All the bees die in a region, Arctic ice reduces 5% per anum per century.
2. Transfer a Billion $US to a UN franchise and a dozen NGO’s, send a kid to the Arctic, All the monarch Butterflies disappear, Koala’s become carnivorous, eat Japanese tourists in the blue mountains.
3. Transfer a Trillion to the UN directly, Credit 50 NGO’s with UN partnership programs, all polar bears spontaneously combust, the Arctic evaporates, revealing subterranean tunnels filled with glacier melting hot water. Petrol hits $10 US a ounce.
4. Transfer the entire material wealth of the US, Canada, U.K, Australia, E.U to the UN, create a standing green army of VERT-JUNGEN storm troopers aged 12 to 19, the seas vaporise, all the whales become sushi and James Hansen becomes Southern Economic Zone Commandant for life.
5.Reduce the Human population to 300 million worthy and deserving souls, all the glaciers catch fire, raining burning ice that cannot be extinguished by any human means down apon the Amazonian rainforest, which explodes with the power of a million Hiroshima bombs. The Moon crashes into Australia ending the Japanese/Koala war.
6.Huddle 90,000 of the worlds richest, most psychotic and demented Elite onto an exclusive man made island, make each one a king or Queen, served by an army of robot servants, the entire Biosphere collapses, Human life becomes the only life on earth, the Sun explodes showering the earth with magical fairy dust, turning everyone into immortal beings with god like powers, ragnorok begins with the storming of valhalla, interest rates level out.
I think the Hernado Effect on an Iceland volcano is about Magnitude 2 on the Fitzy/Hernado scale.
Brilliant, theres a NOBEL waiting to happen.
Don’t you just love the predictions of experts.
This one was on Monday-
“The volcanic activity has essentially stopped,” said Einar Kjartansson, a geophysicist at the Icelandic Meteorological Office. “I believe the eruption has ended.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100412/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_iceland_volcano_tourism
Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced ay-yah-FYAH’-plah-yer-kuh-duh)
“jeroen (11:37:57) : “When is the best moment to see the asscloud???”
Al Gored (13:43:56) : Usually right after you hear the noise.”
Right after Al eats a couple chili-cheese dogs??
If this volcano eruption last pretty long and cause earth surface temperature dropped about 1-2 Celsius, we may have a good opportunity to observe the temperature effect on CO2 concentration.
It is important to have an independent agency to measure CO2.
Terry has it exactly right. Large volcanic eruptions, which emit huge amounts of CO2, more than man can put out, will not cause additional warming. In fact, the particulate and aerosols will provide additional cooling. The summer may be average, maybe inperceptibly cooler, but I bet next winter will be brutally cold.
Why? Because in 1815, already in the Maunder Minimum, which alone caused brutally cold winters, there was a large volcanic eruption. The following year, 1816, was the year without a summer. The highest US temp in 1816 was in the Carolinas, sometime in August. It got up to a sweltering 40 F. With absolutely no influence, either way, from CO2.
I mean, really, do we always haev to ignore history? Is it some kind of human defect that we, alone among all the animals, can comtemplate history and then ignore it? We may be the dominant species but we are not necessarily the smartest.
Here is some more info: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/22047
Is that cloud over Northern Ireland and Scotland, or more global warming still on the ground?
Sunfighter (12:36:55) :
I dont get it. Why would a thin ash cloud bearly reaching the northern part of scotland shut down airports in southern england and northern europe? I plead ignorance on this topic..so im wondering why its such big news?
As a couple of commenters have already mentioned, volcanic ash is abrasive — it will “frost” aircraft windshields (okay, windscreens for the UK folks) and erode the turbine blades in jet engines. If it’s thick enough, it can also clog the intakes or jam the rotating portions of the compressor sections, causing compressor stalls (the turbine engine equivalent of a backfire, but violent enough to cause internal damage to the engine). The ash from violent eruptions is also as corrosive to aircraft-grade aluminum as salt — the helicopters flying search and rescue missions during the Mt. St. Helens eruption were all grounded for structural inspections for several weeks afterwards.
I was living in Auckland in 1996 when Mt Ruapehu, positioned in the middle of the North Island, erupted and was belching ash for 6 weeks or more. Some of this landed on our home and garden and I can certainly verify how abrasive, gritty and unpleasant this ash can be. Flights were also disrupted. The key factor about the volcanic ash in this eruption was that it couldn’t be detected by normal aircraft radar, as it had no water in it and (according to the media then) aircraft radar is set up to detect clouds/water vapour. The net result was that all night flying into or out of Auckland was banned, and only day flights allowed, when the pilot could visually see ash clouds and fly around them. I still remember flying from Auckland to Wellington, seeing ash still coming out of Ruapeho and the various ash clouds this had formed and noting the longer than usual route the pilot was taking to avoid them. Hopefully the UK will be able to implement something similar.
KLA (11:34:57) :
H.R. (10:48:19) :
…My only claim to expertise on volcanos is I know that throwing virgins in to placate the gods has been proven to reduce population
No it hasn’t. Firstly there has never been a large enough pool of virgins in the human population. Secondly their status is mostly a temporary one anyway, and has been too rarely ended by volcanism to have a measurable effect.
This problem of the scarcity of virgins for throwing into volcanos to placate the gods can be solved by defining a new category of “Post-Normal Virginity”.
It’s a technique that has been used successfully in academia to swell the ranks of (climate) scientists.
Savethesharks (15:11:19) :
Fitzy (16:15:22) :
This page is definently worthy of a permanent link.
No mention of the old negative feed back argument on Ice covered volcano’s. Have I missed a post? One of the very first greenhouse sceptic arguments I heard 20 years ago was that Mann et al could not and should not discount or exclude volcanic eruptions from the green house temperature data because warming could have caused the eruptions in the past.
Where Ice sits on a volcano its weight counters the pressure in the magma chamber. A small loss of ice due to local warming can trigger a proportional release of pressure which melts more ice giving a nice and quite catastrophically fast feed back. The ash and SO2 cools the planet renormalising the temperature.
This may have happened with these two volcano’s. Has someone debunked this theory or is it just forgotten or is everyone taking it as an unstated ‘obvious’ assumption.
There is a good chance that the Warmests will try to run with the “Nothing to see here; move on.” line and will try to correct any cooling effects away. It presents an opportunity to rewrite the code and move the goal posts, tamper …er… smooth the data some more.
This wont help the carbon markets now both are flat-lining. The Chicago exchange has dropped back to 10 c from a high of 15 cents. I bet a lot of people lost their money [green pension funds] on that little bump. The futures fund is headed to as close to zero as the software allows and the euroexchange is bouncing about near 14 Euro’s but the volumes at zero!
As the futures go there also goes the market. The hope of getting a cap and trade in the USA and Australia has gone all cloudy too. It now has a snowballs chance in hell: or is that a glacier in a volcano.
geoff pohanka (12:09:57) :
“They will blaim this eruption on global warming. ”
So that would be a “warmblaim”(the opposite of a chillblaim) wouldn’t it?
Nathan (09:53:00) :
Interesting and annoying for other countries, but is there really anything Iceland can do about this? It’s not like you can control volcanoes.
of course they could throw more glacier on it…. oh wait that would cause the oceans to rise!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Never mind……. da da… to do do dee….lala la………..
ron from Texas (17:55:09) :
Do you have a reference for temperature? I believe the high temperature in New England was well above 80°F, but the problem was the depressed storm track and cold air in Canada allowed frequent cold fronts with subfreezing weather behind them.
Thomas Jefferson’s weather log recorded fairly normal, at least non-damaging, temperatures in Virginia. For notes on New England, see http://wermenh.com/1816.html
Oh – the Tambora explosion was a lot bigger than the current eruption and rich in SO2. We’ll see how this one turns out.
“Hernando (10:56:22) :
The volcano erupted because the glacier was melting”…
…No. The volcano erupted because the volcano erupted. A glacier on top of a volcano is the equivalent of a flea on top of an elephant.
Correction! Should read!
I smell sulfur both inside my apartment and outside. I live in Voss east of Bergen, Norway. They reported a couple of hours ago, that it smelled of sulfur in Berg
“Why would a thin ash cloud bearly reaching the northern part of scotland shut down airports in southern england and northern europe?”
…Don’t believe everything you read in the British papers. Yesterday, in London it was bright, sunny and warm. Contrary to MSM reports, there were many flights over London. How do I know this? Because I SAW them. Some papers have printed pictures of our airports with a sickly yellow atmospheric glow all around. This has less to do with volcanoes than Photoshop.
The jets have been grounded because of a sandwich-like layering of ash particles in the atmosphere which raise concerns over the safety of the engines. It’s mainly precautionary, and reflects our “Health and Safety” and legal culture more than any real threat to the environment.
Nature – don’t you just love it. Showing UN, IPCC and various Governments who really is in charge of the planets environment.
Re: Mike Haseler (12:56:54) :
Half an hour ago we watched the sun going down. A complete washout. OK, it was “nice” but we’ve seen much better and it was absolutely nothing to write home about.
—
Same from the Cotswolds, but if I’d checked the imagery they’re probably too far south for any noticeable effects. Still, it was a nice evening to be in the great outdoors. I did wake up to a rather strong sulphurous smell though, but I suspect that was more to do with the sausage, eggs, beans and chips I ate on the way home.
Wally (14:43:23) :
Bill,
I think Sunfighter’s question was not why is ash harmful, but why are they shutting down so much traffic…
Yup — I re-read his question and got that as part two of a two-parter, but circumstances precluded my addressing the flight routes. Dadgum Third-World servers and inconsiderate sandstorms…
GilesE (19:56:40) :
The key factor about the volcanic ash in this eruption [Mt Ruapehu] was that it couldn’t be detected by normal aircraft radar, as it had no water in it and (according to the media then) aircraft radar is set up to detect clouds/water vapour.
True dat. Volcanic ash can’t be detected on aircraft radar — what aircraft radar *does* detect is rain (medium to heavy precipitation) and hail, because those are two indicators of thunderstorms and the probability of extreme turbulence and microbursts, which are airplane-killers.