If you have a long plane flight upcoming, heads up. This volcano could affect air travel, particularly in Europe.
It’s still erupting under the glacier: this will likely produce catastrophic local flood, once it breaks out. In the meanwhile the Icelandic government has evacuated areas to the north and put a no-fly around the volcano itself: Icelandic airports are still open.
It’s strange, but I live not far from Heathrow airport in the UK. When the last Icelandic volcano went off I had a week of peace and quiet. The sky wasn’t full of planes and vapour trails and noise. No early flights, no late flights, nothing to interrupt a night of quiet sleep. Part of me wouldn’t mind another week of plane empty skies (and last time I ended up putting up a stranded passenger for a week – so I know there is a price to pay).
I found out about the 2010 eruption while waiting in Atlanta to board an airplane to London. They made it sound like it was routine, like a thunderstorm. Then they closed the airports in London about two hours before we would have landed. After that it was a bit like living in a James Bond movie – obviously there was an evil genius behind it all (perhaps using the volcano to blackmail the Icelandic banks), and I was suddenly in parts of Europe I’d never intended to see, staying in exotic hotels, riding the Eurostar under the Channel Tunnel, etc. With two year old in tow (or rather sleeping up on my shoulders).
More epic than the time I missed my plane to Oslo and ended up in Geneva, which was busy shipping out UN Blue Berets to somewhere…caught a Lufthansa which finally caught me up with my luggage in Oslo….
The volcano is not, they have decided, erupting under the ice—yet. It’s accelerating the earthquakes, however.
Latest from Rei (in Reykjavik) is that eruption, if any, isn’t actually happening. There was a big magma movement along the fissure, so the front end of that is now *not* under the glacier – that’s actually an improvement, and means no flash-flood along that face from melting ice.