Just The Beginning?
Well, that's a little unsettling. The revealed potential for another, likely more urgently ferocious volcanic eruption from Iceland's fields of ice and snow, glaciers and snow-topped volcanoes. Worse yet to come? People are only now beginning to find their way home through alternate, inadequate and costly travel means. Now that is quite troubling, the contemplation that more of the same, but much more, may be on the horizon.Apart from the fact that as it is, thousands of people have been left stranded, unable to complete their plans to return home after journeys abroad, others unable to travel to planned destinations, and the international travel industry along with the airline industry in an uproar of dislocation. And lost profits. No industry can survive very long without profits to enable it to continue offering services to a paying public. Apart from the severe inconvenience of the situation, the loss to countries' economies is enormous.
And this, the fallout from a middling-sized volcanic eruption. Which is finally on its way to being history as the mountain crater is slowly settling down, eruptions becoming less frequent and expected to still very soon. How soon? Soon. Who knows, actually, but soon. Just think of what all that molten rock resulted in; the melting of vast sheets of ice with blazing lava flow. The stoppage of global air traffic resulting from its towering wall of ash, dust and steam.
The Sunday Telegraph was informed by Icelandic volcanologists that it was not quite possible to predict how long the eruptions would be expected to continue from Eyjafjallajokull (how's that for a mouthful?) Warning, at the same time that a companion volcano which in the past has sympathized with Eyjafjallajokull to the extent that it too, would erupt later, in another gorgeous-sunset-inspiring fireworks display of melted-rock-into-glass.
Yes, there is another, more powerful volcano sitting right there in that untamed landscape of glacial valleys, volcanoes with their incendiary propensities to blast, and bubbling geysers, all sitting atop a fault line between two huge shifting tectonic plates. Iceland, in fact, is home to 22 active volcanoes, and the one that erupted is a middling-sized one. If its neighbour, Katla, decides to blow too, the chaos that would result would represent a far greater disruption than the current one.
Because when it last erupted in 1918, before air flight became an international sky-traffic phenomenon, it produced roughly ten times the molten rock as its now-erupting neighbour, with concomitantly more ash and steam - an estimated 60,000 feet into the bowl of the welcoming sky.
"...we do know from past ash layers that are embedded together that the two volcanoes seem to be inter-connected in the timings of previous explosions", according to British glacier expert Matthew Jones, who monitors volcanic activity at the Icelandic meteorological office.
Oh dear.
Labels: Environment, Nature, Troublespots
posted by Pieface @ Monday, April 19, 2010
<< Home