Iceland, soon to be Ashland

The EyeFullofAsh Volcano certainly has an effect on Global Air Traffic, being that the whole system pancackes onto itself when European airtraffic is grounded.

anyone know a good link for live ash cloud tracking? (my sis is stuck in spain!)

Looks like Europe just blew all the money devoted to pollution controls for the last century or so. The lesson, we don’t do it for Gaia, we do it to quit coughing.
Any evidence the nearby volcano is teaming up yet? Isn’t it believed that the next door bigger volcano shares the same lava reservoir? And isn’t it supposed to be the bigger one? I read in the news reports they seem to go off in pairs.

The last 48 hours has shown a significant increase in earthquake activity in this area. I keep my eyes on the large “white patch” just to the East which is the glacier on top of Katla.
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/myrdalsjokull/

So…all green europeans becoming gray. Interesting times indeed, hope for more skeptic behaviour from mother gaia. Check for Cancun´s closest volcanoes…just in case.

noaaprogrammer says:
May 10, 2010 at 12:49 pm
See: http://www.evropusamvinna.is/page/ies_Eyjafjallajokull_eruption
Most of it is in english.

‘Sulfur dioxide turns into tiny droplets of sulfuric acid.’
pfft, sulfur dioxide turns into mirrors, and sulfur acid is what humans out gassed in the 80’s, hence the acid rain back then, just ask the greenies. :p

I wuold like to know what does this closing of airports mean again. Who’s game is it? If one looks at the satelite (Eumetsat animation – may 4-9 <a href="http://xmarinx.sweb.cz//volcanic-dust-04-05-10-to-09-05-10-v2.gif&quot; title=”http://xmarinx.sweb.cz//volcanic-dust-04-05-10-to-09-05-10-v2.gif” rel=”nofollow”> – one quite clearly sees the ash was circling between Iceland and Greenland last 5 days and one minor branch of the cloud went slightly through northern Spain and dissipated then in western mediteranean, so one much doesn’t understand why they’re shutting airports in the central Europe. Moreover there was this in the Czech media: “Transatlantic flights will be diverted through Greenland, declares the european agency Eurocontrol.” Why the heck would they send the airplanes on transantlantic lines in the most extreme ash concentration area – as quite clearly shows the satelite – and at the same time close central European airports – some thousands miles from Iceland, where no significant ash cloud can be detected? Classical eurobureaucracy stunt or something more? Anybody?
There were reports that actually there are multiple NATO military drills in several European countries including Germany going on. Do they need the clear skies?

Very beautiful picture!
Now we need to wait two years and then upload it to, say the wikipedia together with a text that says it’s the exhaust from a new aluminium smeltering plant on Iceland…

Environmental impacts over an extended period of time of activity over Iceland and the EU are probably not going to be good. Travel delays and reroutes will be a nasty problem, as well. The constant feed of ash and gases into the lower and middle atmosphere affecting millions of people for weeks or months is going to take a toll. Icelandic eruptions are never good for this region of the world.

Is this a genuine risk or just an over reaction? I find it difficult to comprehend how ash from a relatively small eruption can affect aircraft over 3000 [Iceland to Israel] miles away! If this is a precedent then if a few volcanoes around the world go off simultaneously then we could have a global shutdown for months. Why do I get the feeling that without supercomputers and modelling we wouldn’t be so concerned. And [as historically] for aircraft a reasonable distance away there would be no problems.
cheers David

O/T speaking of volcanoes and earthquakes:
”
During the month of April 2010, 117 earthquakes were located in the Yellowstone region. The largest event was a magnitude 3.3 on April 3rd at 9:15 PM MDT, located about 7 miles east southeast of West Yellowstone, MT. This event was part of a swarm which lasted from April 1st to the 7th. The swarm contained 52 earthquakes, with magnitudes 0.4 to 3.3. This latest swarm is considered part of the intense January/February Madison Plateau 2010 earthquake swarm that contained more than 2,300 earthquakes. A summary of the Madison Plateau swarm can be found at: “ http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/publications/2010/10swarm.php
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/
Also if you want to track earthquakes during the last 48 hours in Iceland try:
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/myrdalsjokull/

I received this e-mail from a friend. I can’t verify the facts, but the implications are interesting.
Bob
Interesting observations
For all of you out there in America and across the globe who have fought so hard to tackle the hideous enemy of our planet, namely carbon emissions, that bogus god you worship named “Climate Change” or “Global Warming”, there is some really bad news that will be very painful for you to process. But it is my duty to pass it on to you anyway.
Are you sitting down?
Okay, here’s the bombshell. The current volcanic eruption going on in Iceland, since it first started spewing volcanic ash a week ago, has, to this point, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet. Not only that, this single act of God has added emissions to the earth estimated to be 42 times more than can be corrected by the extreme human regulations proposed for annual reductions.
I know, I know…. (have a group hug)…it’s very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up til midnight to finish your kid’s “The Green Revolution” science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, going on vacation to a city park instead of Yosemite, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your $1 light bulbs with $10 light bulbs …well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just the past week.
The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere in the past week has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And, those hundreds of thousands of American jobs you helped move to Asia with expensive emissions demands on businesses… you know, the ones that are creating even more emissions than when they were creating American jobs, well that must seem really worthwhile now.
I’m so sorry. And I do wish that there was some kind of a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud but the fact of the matter is that the brush fire season across the western U.S.A. will start in about two months and those fires will negate your efforts to reduce carbon emissions in our world for the next two years.
So, grab a Coke, give the world a hug, and have a nice day!

“In most cases, though, high-latitude eruptions have little influence on global climate even when they are explosive enough to inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere”
So does that mean the AGW crowd won’t try and blame the current cooling trend on this or similar eruptions?

rbateman said on May 10, 2010 at 1:58 pm:

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
May 10, 2010 at 1:15 pm
52F underground is cold. Add the requisite ventilation requirements out in main haulage, and one needs a heavy coat plus thermals to stand up to the windchill. Don’t get your feet wet, pard.

I’ve taken that tour twice so far, back when I was a school kid. It was very bearable with just a light jacket, and there wasn’t really any “wind” to notice.
Besides, did you forget those old sayings showing the relative nature of those temperatures, or are said sayings just a “local” thing in these “cold” temperate zones? “When it gets cold enough to put on a sweater in fall is when it gets warm enough to take off a sweater in spring.” Various wording exist of the same thought.

Dramatic photos of the eruption:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/more_from_eyjafjallajokull.html

“Sulfur dioxide turns into tiny droplets of sulfuric acid. These light-colored droplets cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight back to space.”
OMG, that sounds just like…VENUS! CO2 increasing, sulfuric acid increasing, oceans overheating…the Venusians are obviously “venus-forming” our planet! James Hansen tried to warn us, but we didn’t listen!

Sulfur dioxide turns into tiny droplets of sulfuric acid.
But SO2 would only form sulfurous acid. Does the SO2 pick up the extra oxygen at high altitude? Or what is the mechanism?

I propose that the EPA ban volcanoes….. If you can ban CO2, you can ban anything;-)

Dr Bob
Very well put Bob. I went to the hardware store today and saw all those silly bulbs and had an angry feeling. Messed up my whole day. How can so many folks be so stupid?

From: http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/issue_pdfs/23_1/23-1_staudigel2.pdf
On underwater seamounts that have formed from volcanoes: “…that have not
yet shoaled enough to be dominated by
shallow-water explosive activity (which
starts at ~ 700-m water depth). There
may be hundreds of thousands of such
seamounts (Wessel et al., 2010)”
So what we are seeing from Iceland could be happening in countless places underwater everyday and we have no idea it’s happening. Maybe this, not fossil fuels, explains the rising CO2.

Live web cam with heat sensor cam:
http://eldgos.mila.is/eyjafjallajokull-fra-thorolfsfelli/

Richard Sharpe May 10, 2010 at 7:58 pm
But that leaves us to explain why now? (Why has such volcanic activity only occurred during the last 50 years or so?)
The volcanic activity has been occurring all along — it’s only been during the last half-century that we’ve had the instruments to detect them at the depths most of them are located.
Surtsey is a pretty good example — the initial eruption took place in 19

Does anyone know what the composition of the ash is? I have predicted that dust deposition rich in zinc and/or cadmium leachates will switch plankton fixation towards C3 from C4, which will discriminate against 13C (and 14C of course). If there’s a lot of those metals going into the ocean then it’s possible there’ll be an isotopic signal.
Is anyone looking?
JF

Off topic courtesy of Gail Combs but isn’t Yellowstone one giant volcano waiting to blow?

The eruption may not have much impact on the climate, but the ash could have an interesting effect on local ocean life:
http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2010/04/27/scientists_to_measure_impact_of_volcanic_ash_on_ocean_biology.html
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/sciencemedicine/story/3A418B68E4EE754586257710007C6549?OpenDocument
This is geo-engineering/ocean-seeding, Mother Nature style.

@ CC “Isn’t Yellowstone one giant volcano waiting to blow.”
Yes and no. You hear a lot about the “Yellowstone supervolcano.” But my impression (and perhaps any of the actual geologists that visit the board can confirm) is that Yellowstone has to go through a period of extruding lava or ash from the magma source until some critical point is reached where the caldera collapses in on itself creating the super-eruption.

Julian Flood May 11, 2010 at 3:04 am
Does anyone know what the composition of the ash is?

http://www.evropusamvinna.is/solofile/1015833

Damn.
Messed up the blockquote.
DaveE.

Drew Latta says:
May 11, 2010 at 10:42 am
@ CC “Isn’t Yellowstone one giant volcano waiting to blow.”
Yes and no. You hear a lot about the “Yellowstone supervolcano.” But my impression (and perhaps any of the actual geologists that visit the board can confirm) is that Yellowstone has to go through a period of extruding lava or ash from the magma source until some critical point is reached where the caldera collapses in on itself creating the super-eruption.
______________________________________________________________
It is nice to hear that. It means we in the USA would have plenty of warning. Only having earthquake activity as a warning made me a bit twitchy given the activity of late.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/science/01yellowstone.html
“In the last two weeks, more than 100 mostly tiny earthquakes a day, on average, have rattled a remote area of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, putting scientists who monitor the park’s strange and volatile geology on alert.
Researchers say that for now, the earthquake cluster, or swarm — the second-largest ever recorded in the park — is more a cause for curiosity than alarm…. there had been 1,608 quakes since Jan. 17.”

I agree Eyjafjallajökull should not affect the global climate significantly, but me thinks much of the NH is in for a wet summer, lousy wet in places.
Some comments on Yellowstone…
http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/2010/04/reawakening_redoubt.php
LuRose, I definitely confirm what Gordys said before. The 2012 movie has great animations but no whatsoever scientific value. It’s a sci-fi movie. Plus, we’re in 2010 not in 2012 ;-D
But seriously. Yellowstone is a volcano that could potentially generate a very large explosive eruption, like it has done in its past. Three of its eruptions in the past little more than 2 million years have been cataclysmic and their repetition today would severely affect a good portion of the U.S. and also have global (economic and possibly climatic) repercussions. The last such enormous eruption – unfortunately often called “supereruption”, which is not a very adequate term – occurred about 650,000 years ago.
But Yellowstone has had hundreds of eruptions that nobody talks about because they’ve been much smaller, and many have occurred since the last great cataclysm, most recently 70,000 years ago. Chances that the next eruption of Yellowstone will be such a modest-sized event are about a thousand times greater than the next eruption will be another gigantic one. And chances that any one of us will see a new eruption in Yellowstone are millions of times inferior to the probability of getting killed in a car crash.
We should then also remember that Yellowstone is only one of a vast number of potentially active huge volcanic systems on this planet. It is the most famous and it lies in the heart of the U.S. which makes it more of a myth than any one of its companion volcanoes. But some of those other volcanoes are far more dangerous in my opinion because (a) they have erupted historically, sometimes repeatedly, and therefore seem to receive higher rates of magma supply than Yellowstone; (b) they are much more densely populated than Yellowstone and thus they will be a threat for millions of human lives even if they produce only relatively small eruptions. One of these lies in the country where I live, Italy; it’s called Campi Flegrei, it has one-third of the city of Naples lying WITHIN its caldera, and it has produced two very massive explosive eruptions in the past 40,000 years.
So it’s all a question of perspective, and if we want to understand how dangerous and how active Yellowstone really is, we must also understand what other volcanoes of the same type are there. This is not necessarily encouraging, but I would bet my whole stock of fine Etna red wines that we’ll see many other volcanoes, even of those larger ones, erupt before something serious happens at Yellowstone.
Posted by: Boris Behncke | April 6, 2010 1:10 PM
16 To underscore Boris’ sensible explanation, please see Smithsonian’s Global Volcano Program (GVP) Yellowstone volcano summary page
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1205-01-
There have been no magmetic Yellowstone eruptions since the late Pleistocene. Subsequent eruptions in the early Holocene have been hydrothermal. It is also the reason why the USGS has said repeatedly that these swarms are hydrothermal in nature and that there is little reason to fear a cataclysmic magmetic eruption. Yellowstone has the distinction of being one the worlds largest hydrothermal geyser systems.
Posted by: Passerby | April 6, 2010 1:29 PM