Volcano eruptions in Iceland could last for years
Volcano eruptions in Iceland could last for “months or even years,” leaving aviation chaos and atmospheric damage in its wake.
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The eruptions from a volcano in Iceland could last for “months or even years,” leaving aviation chaos and atmospheric damage in its wake, a leading volcanologist says.
“If a lava dome forms, if that happens, we’re in for a fairly long eruption,” Dr. Thor Thordarson, an expert on Icelandic volcanoes, told the Star from the University of Edinburgh.
“We’d have events like this popping up every now and then.”
Thordarson was referring to ash from the second eruption of a volcano in Iceland, which forced Britain to cancel all flights in its airspace Thursday and disrupted air travel around the world, including flights from Toronto to northern Europe.
Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland have also grounded planes.
“If you fly through an ash cloud, your windows will get all pitted,” Thordarson said. “But the biggest concern is if the ash gets into the turbines. They can stick to the plane’s turbines and the engines drop.”
While ash belching from the volcano is the immediate concern, the levels of sulphur dioxide and other corrosive gases that the eruption releases will create a long-term effect on the climate, Thordarson said.
“Right now, it’s too small for that. It’s not climatically significant at this stage. If it dies out soon, I don’t think we will see any impact on the atmosphere.”
But if the eruption changes and produces a lava dome at the summit that then collapses into an explosion, the impact could be much more significant, he said.
In 1992, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines shot 18 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide and ash more than 20 kilometres into the air, causing death and widespread destruction. Temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped 0.6 degrees C in 1992 and 1993. The even larger explosion of Krakatau in 1883 circled the globe with haze with atmospheric changes that lasted months.
Another of Iceland’s volcanoes was responsible, in 1783, for plunging North America into one of its longest and coldest winters on record. In Britain, gases on the jet stream poisoned people and crops failed in Western Europe.
The current blast that started Wednesday is the second from a volcano on the Eyjafjallajokull Glacier, which burst to life in March after 200 years. The Icelandic Government Information Centre reports ash fall of up to three millimetres in places. Although relatively small, the eruption was “rich in sulphur concentrations,” said Thordarson, who was in Iceland last week studying the impact. “I suspect the current eruption is a bit more evolved and more viscous, with more material coming out.”
Scientists cannot easily see what exactly is going on at the top of the volcano at the moment, he said. Thordarson is anxious to get back to Iceland for research. Flash floods from magma melting glaciers have forced hundreds of Icelanders to evacuate and caused significant damage around the volcano.
“Ash has a shorter resonance time in the atmosphere,” Canadian volcanologist Mariek Schmidt explained. “The sulphur dioxide will rate with water creating sulphuric acid that stays in the atmosphere.”
This new phase “means that things are changing” inside the volcano, the Brock University professor said. “It is interesting that this happened.
Schmidt is monitoring the volcano’s activity on scienceblogs.com/eruptions.
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