Another eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull Volcano in Iceland, another round of air traffic closures.
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After more than a week of relatively subdued activity in late April, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull Volcano began a fresh round of explosive ash eruptions in the first week of May. On the morning of May 6, 2010, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this view of a thick plume of ash blowing east and then south from the volcano. Clouds bracket the edges of the scene, but the dark blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean show in the middle, and above them, a rippling, brownish-yellow river of ash.
Ash clouds like this are impressive to see, and they can have a dramatic influence on air quality and vegetation, including crops. In Iceland, the ash from Eyjafjallajokull has settled thickly on the ground, posing a threat to livestock and wildlife. The risk of engine damage due to ash has grounded European air traffic repeatedly.
Despite their dramatic appearance, however, these ash plumes are insignificant when it comes to long-term affects on global climate. What matters most to the climate isn’t even visible in images like this. For an eruption to have an influence on global climate, the event must be explosive enough to push sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which is above the altitude where rain and snow occur.
Sulfur dioxide turns into tiny droplets of sulfuric acid. These light-colored droplets cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight back to space. Because it doesn’t rain in the stratosphere, the droplets can linger for months or years. Massive eruptions can cool the global average surface temperature by several degrees for several years.
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; the reflective particles rarely have a chance to spread around the globe. Stratospheric air generally rises above tropical latitudes, spreads toward the poles, and then sinks back toward the lower atmosphere at high latitudes.
This circulation pattern means that stratospheric particles from eruptions in the tropics have a better chance of spreading all around the world, while particles from high-latitude eruptions are more likely to quickly sink back to lower altitudes. When they re-enter the troposphere, they are rapidly washed out of the atmosphere by rain and snow. Eyjafjallajokull’s high-latitude location means that its eruption probably won’t influence the global climate significantly.
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References
- Schmidt, G. (2006, May 16). Current volcanic activity and climate? RealClimate.org. Retrieved May 6, 2010.
Story from NASA Earth Observsatory
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It’s purely coincidental, but Ashland, New Hampshire has a granite monument (carved out a glacial erratic) commemorating the Year without a Summer due to the last Tambora eruption.
http://wermenh.com/1816.html
Of course, it’s the SO2, not the ash, but SO2land just doesn’t sound right, and it was Ashland before Tambora exploded.
From Ric Werme on May 10, 2010 at 9:55 pm:
Ah New Hampshire, with the famous “The Old Man of the Mountain” natural rock formation that was featured on their State Quarter released in 2000. Quite impressive.
Or at least it was, until that feature fell off the mountain in 2003 due to global warming.
😉
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
snip-snippety-snip twitchy server!
The volcanic island of Surtsey is a pretty good example — the initial eruption took place in 1963 and continued until 1967 — if it hadn’t started in such shallow water (130 meters or so), we’d likely never have known about it.
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
I thought it was very considerate of the volcano to hold off for the UK general election day. Climate change also was put on hold as Gordon Brown made two return journeys by private jet from London to his constituency in Scotland. Other party leaders also re-prioritised their commitment to carbon neutrality in the interests of being driven around in Jags complete with entourages of 4X4 vehicles.
Going back to the ash cloud, I think they are trying to stop air travel in Europe. This is primarily by the ash cloud modelling but are also engineering a strike by BA crews. The EU of course is in financial meltdown, but public disorder is so far confined to Greece……
Off topic courtesy of Gail Combs but isn’t Yellowstone one giant volcano waiting to blow?
jack morrow says: (May 10, 2010 at 7:23 pm)
“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?”
My sentiments exactly: “How can so many folks be so stupid?”
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.
I read a thing a while back talking about the stratosphere and how it figured into the US’s defense of nukes coming in from Russia over the poles. The discussion talked about how the stratosphere was lower at the poles, higher in the tropics…Basing what we have heard (and I have been following the blog at Eruptions.com) we are getting a lot of stuff into the 30-40 km range. This puts SO2 in the atmosphere and effects the enviroment, contrary to what we are being told be the intelligentsia who are using the 50 tp 60 km figure they are using from around the tropics. I also came across a web page http://www.yr.no/verkart/1.7103434 that uses a fallout program to track what the ash is doing.
@ur momisugly 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.
If this volcano isn’t a problem because it isn’t ejecting stuff into the stratosphere, then why is my car such a problem. The exhaust pipe actually points down a bit toward to ground. So it can’t eject anything anywhere near the stratosphere.
http://www.evropusamvinna.is/solofile/1015833
paulc says:
May 10, 2010 at 5:57 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/10/iceland-soon-to-be-ashland/#comment-387260
Damn.
Messed up the blockquote.
DaveE.
One of my little treasures is an 1836 British hand-coloured map entitled ‘Islands in the Atlantic’, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. They took their science seriously, those days.
In the segment devoted to the Azores, there is an intriguing notation for a location just off the west tip of Santo Miguel:
A known unknown, all this vulcanism, methinks.
Drew Latta says:
May 11, 2010 at 10:42 am
@ur momisugly 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.”
Hugo M re leachates:
Thanks.
JF
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
FWIW, this map of Iceland shows only greater than 2.5 magnitude quakes, so it’s an easy “spot” if a big one has happened in the last week. As I type, it is devoid of quakes:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/10/340_65.php
Per Yellowstone: If it goes in a super eruption, we lose basically everything to Chicago, the globe gets very dark and very cold, and if we’re lucky, some civilization will survive somewhere in the southern hemisphere with lots of ocean to fish an not much population to support (say, Australia or New Zealand) but don’t count on it…
Also note that there have been fairly consistent quakes around Long Valley Caldera near Mammoth Mountain California – another “supervolcano” site, though far less frequently discussed. Odds are it will be smaller than a Yellowstone event, and I might even survive the first week… (Winds taking most of the ash toward Phoenix or Denver and little making it “up wind” to me…)
It’s that ‘wad’ of activity just below the “kink” in the California / Nevada border:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/
About even in latitude with the S.F. Bay Area…
Thank you Mr. Smith. And (from Denver) on that cheerful note…
Test results now in on “safe” ash concentrations for flight.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18802-engine-stripdowns-establish-safe-volcanic-ash-levels.html
http://blog.taragana.com/science/2010/04/22/scientists-establish-how-much-volcanic-ash-jet-engine-can-safely-suck-in-11314/
But despite the rather confident claims for knowing levels, you have to wonder. Did they fly the planes to the point of “flame-out”? What will be the more insidious, long-term effects from multiple flights?
The Libyan airbus that went down in North Africa this week (leaving a sole survivor) was a relatively new airliner. The officials are denying that it flew through the dust clouds had any effect, and there were some reports of “breakup” during landing, but Met Office satellite maps show that clouds of dust were on their way across Northern Africa from the east, that had already reached Spain and Tunisia, and concentrations had progressed to the east and were at the time of the crash, visible in Turkey. European pilots must be very nervous about these “clearances” to fly – and particularly anxious about the accruacy of Met satellite reports.
paulc says:
May 10, 2010 at 5:57 pm
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?
Gas phase oxidation by OH also liquid phase oxidation in water droplets (traces of NH3 catalyse the reaction).