Due to a "small" volcanic eruption in Iceland UK airspace has been closed to all traffic since early this morning and is likely to stay that way until Friday at least.

The Icelandic vulcanologists are worried that this eruption is a precursor of worse to come. Historically when this volcano has erupted it has triggered a larger event in a neighbouring system. This has the potential of causing even worse disruption.

As ever the BBC has some good coverage on this. The videos are worth watching.
BBC News - Icelandic volcanic ash alert grounds UK flights

And now for the science part: BBC News - Prof Peter Sammonds: The science behind ash cloud
BBC News - Volcanic ash 'very hazardous' to aircraft

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx9QQU5bU8I

The BBC vids may not work in your country.
Good coverage on YouTube.
YouTube - iceland volcano

The Goracle is absolutely orgasmic watching the Eyjafjallajokull glacier melt.

Iceland is having a heck of a year. 1st they go bankrupt with the subsequent Icesave dispute;and the Icelandic debt repayment referendum voted down by 93% of the voters...

And now the tourist industry they were counting on is going up in smoke.

I remember watching one of those Mayday Discovery shows about a plane downed by ash in the turbines.

I have heard we are only five major volcanic eruptions away from permanent winter so let's ask ourselves how close we are

18 Active Volcanos
EGON
Flores Island (Indonesia)
(-8.67, 122.45)
ETNA
Sicily (Italy)
(37.734, 15.004)
EYJAFJOLL
Southern Iceland
(63.63, -19.62)
GAUA
Banks Islands (SW Pacific)
(-14.27, 167.5)
MIYAKE-JIMA
Izu Islands (Japan)
(34.079, 139.529)
REDOUBT
Southwestern Alaska
(60.485, -152.742)
REVENTADOR
Ecuador
(-0.077, -77.656)
ARENAL
Costa Rica
(10.463, -84.703)
BATU TARA
Komba Island (Indonesia)
(-7.792, 123.579)
DUKONO
Halmahera
(1.68, 127.88)
KARYMSKY
Eastern Kamchatka
(54.05, 159.45)
KILAUEA
Hawaii (USA)
(19.421, -155.287)
KLIUCHEVSKOI
Central Kamchatka (Russia)
(56.057, 160.638)
POPOCATEPETL
México
(19.023, -98.622)
RABAUL
New Britain
(-4.271, 152.203)
SAKURA-JIMA
Kyushu
(31.585, 130.657)
SHIVELUCH
Central Kamchatka (Russia)
(56.653, 161.36)
SOUFRIERE HILLS
Montserrat
(16.72, -62.18)

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Flights across the UK are to remain grounded for a second day as volcanic ash from Iceland drifts across Europe.

At 0230BST, the air traffic control body Nats extended its unprecedented restrictions on most flights into and out of the UK until at least 1900.

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Well that's us scuppered then ;)

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Originally Posted by tomder55

The Goracle is absolutely orgasmic watching the Eyjafjallajokull glacier melt.

Iceland is having a heck of a year. 1st they go bankrupt with the subsequent Icesave dispute;and the Icelandic debt repayment referendum voted down by 93% of the voters .....

and now the tourist industry they were counting on is going up in smoke.

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Look who would want to go there anyway, they should find some place else to live

Yeah go back to Scandanavia where they came from!

Damn glad I'M not traveling internationally right now...

I feel for those people stranded in foreign airports.

Here's some more food for thought
Supervolcanoes - where are they likely to occur?

Guess I got to cancel that trip to Yellowstone.

Hope Mt St Helen remains stable through the summer so I can hike around Mt Ranier in peace.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

guess I gotta cancel that trip to Yellowstone.

Hope Mt St Helen remains stable through the summer so I can hike around Mt Ranier in peace.

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If it is a volcano I would stay away from it, they have a nasty habit of triggering each other

Well still completely closed down.
That's SIX days now and it's costing the industry upwards of $200 million a day!
BBC News - Flight ban extended to sixth day

I see the fleet did a 21st century version of Dunkirk.

Forget air transportation. This gave my vendors another excuse to delay delivery of product.

Suddenly the risk is no so great and they will fly despite the ash cloud. I expect it will be seen as an act of God when an aircraft crashes instead of an act of stupidity. All this proves is the mighty dollar rules.

We should be thinking about the implications of this for the weather and global warming/cooling. It has provided an instant solution to global warming for the time being and recent reports suggest the ash cloud will soon reach Canada. I see a revival on the horizon for high speed trains

This stinks ,we're looking at a Krakatoa summer just as I was getting ready to plant my garden.

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I see a revival on the horizon for high speed trains

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Revival ? There can' t be a revival if it never was established in the 1st place.This country will never buy into high speed rail even though I wish there was more freight delivered by rail.

Cool visual: http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/smoke.gif

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Originally Posted by KeepItSimpleStupid

Cool visual: http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/smoke.gif

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Yes pretty pictures but was this real or a mathematical simulation?

In retrospect ;was there an over reaction ? De Spiegel and the Telegraph look at the events with 20/20 hindsight.
Eyjafjallajökull Awakes: How an Icelandic Volcano Shut Down Europe's Airspace - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Volcanic ash: cloud of uncertainty - Telegraph
The ironic thing is that the computer projections were much more dire than what really occurred . Sort of like the AGW computer models.
Is this over reaction the result of the Western world becoming too risk adverse ?

Max Hastings thinks so.

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Extravagant responses to risk are a bane of our times. In 1988, health minister Edwina Currie almost destroyed Britain's egg industry when she said that salmonella in eggs might cause a human catastrophe - only for it to be later discovered that salmonella could not get into eggs.
In 1996, Britain spent £7 billion killing millions of the nation's cows in response to the alleged threat of CJD killing humans eating burgers made from cattle infected by BSE. We now know that the likelihood of this was almost infinitesimally slight.
In 2009, the government spent £1 billion on unneeded vaccines against swine flu, which we were told might kill half a million people. The SARS virus, said some 'experts', could prove more devastating to humanity than Aids. It was once suggested that bird flu might kill 150 million people worldwide.
Back to transport. After 9/11, many Americans were reluctant to fly, so drove to their destinations instead. One statistical analysis suggests that 2,500 extra road deaths ensued. Flying would have been much safer.
The British are grotesquely sensitive to rail accidents, though figure show that train travel is by far the safest means of going anywhere.

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Iceland volcano eruption: The price we pay for a society that overreacts to risk | Mail Online

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Originally Posted by tomder55

The ironic thing is that the computer projections were much more dire than what really occured .

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They used visuals from pilots flying their routes. Did you want to take a chance having your turbine engine aspirate ash at 30,000 feet?

When Mt St Helen went up ,the skys around it were grounded ;but that didn't mean that all the sky in the Western US was shut down.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

When Mt St Helen went up ,the skys around it were grounded ;but that didn't mean that all the sky in the Western US was shut down.

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Different winds, different geographical area, totally different use of that area for flight routes.

Yeah I know... Alaska Air routinely flys near volcanic activity . Their pilots are well versed in what can an can't be attempted . The whole region is never shut down like the EU did .

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Originally Posted by tomder55

Alaska Air routinely flys near volcanic activity .

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I'd like to see proof that a commercial jet flew through ash.

I said near . I did not say through . There was no reason to close the whole region down . They were able to plot the ash cloud and model the direction it went. Alaska Air I believe stays about 30 miles away from the direct ash clouds they routinely encounter .

The Der Speigel article says it did not even go that high in the sky.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

yeah I know ...Alaska Air routinely flys near volcanic activity . Their pilots are well versed in what can an can't be attempted . The whole region is never shut down like the EU did .

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BUT and it's a big BUT Alaska airspace is way quieter than European.
While this was a major PITA for all involved, with the number of different countries and associated governments I honestly believe that erring on the side of caution, was the correct action to take.
I wonder how America would have reacted to the same circumstances ?
Mt St Helens did spread as far or as fast as this one (yes I'm not even going to try and spell it).

The main worry now is the neighbouring system of Katla that has a tendency of firing off shortly after this one goes. History shows that it erupts every century and the last recorded was 1918, so we are due.

Turns out the ash cloud was the imagination of computer models .

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Britain's airspace was closed under false pretences, with satellite images revealing there was no doomsday volcanic ash cloud over the entire country.

However, new evidence shows there was no all-encompassing cloud and, where dust was present, it was often so thin that it posed no risk...

The satellite images demonstrate that the skies were largely clear, which will not surprise the millions who enjoyed the fine, hot weather during the flight ban...

Evidence has emerged that the maximum density of the ash was only about one 20th of the limit that scientists, the Government, and aircraft and engine manufacturers have now decided is safe.
British Airways chief Willie Walsh always insisted the total shutdown went too far.
'My personal belief is that we could have safely continued operating for a period,' he said.

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Remember that ash cloud? It didn't exist, says new evidence | Mail Online

I wonder if these UK Met models were designed by the same folks that designed East Anglia and the IPCC's models for AGW ?

One of these days some doomsday alarmists who isn't a chicken -little will get it right . But no one will pay attention to them .

Sorry to say Tom, but not everything The Mail writes can be trusted.

Admittedly if even ONE plane had problems, or worse crashed, due to this issue the outcry would have been far worse then what they actually did do.

I guess it depends on who you ask:
Volcanic ash cloud: Pilots warn against 'rash' decisions to allow flights | World news | guardian.co.uk

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European airline pilots warned governments and safety regulators today against making "rash" decisions to allow planes to fly through volcanic ash clouds amid growing pressure from airlines across Europe to create "safe flying corridors" to get flights moving again.

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The Daily Mail is a trash rag, never use it as a definitive source. What do you think about this?
Iceland volcano: RAF suspends Typhoon flight training as ash found in engine | Mail Online

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The military suspended training flights after the Typhoon pilots noticed a sudden and dramatic loss of power in their engines.

Returning to RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire after an exercise, they encountered ash at 30,000 feet - just below the cruising altitude of civilian jets.

'The ash was so thick in one of the aircraft that it was literally scooped up and put in a plastic container,' said a source at the Ministry of Defence.

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Originally Posted by Curlyben

Sorry to say Tom, but not everything The Mail writes can be trusted.

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Haha, you beat me to it!

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not everything The Mail writes can be trusted.

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Sort of like the NY Slimes.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

sorta like the NY Slimes.

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Yet you use it often as a source. :rolleyes:

Speaking of doomsday alarmists, all I know is it's been awfully cold in Texas for spring and a little global warming would be nice. And for the 4th year in a row, another alarmist had to be rescued trying to show us how warm the arctic is becoming.

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Originally Posted by NeedKarma

Yet you use it often as a source. :rolleyes:

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That's because there a people on this site that tell me which sources should be sourced and which ones are unreliable . I just try to accommodate . The Slimes is not that difficult to repudiate ;and since it is the self proclaimed "paper of record" I don't have to constantly have these discussions about approved sources that I should use.

Tom for more reliable UK sources you are better off with these:
The Independent | News | UK and Worldwide News | Newspaper
Telegraph.co.uk: news, business, sport, the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Sunday Telegraph - Telegraph
And
Times Online | News and Views from The Times and Sunday Times

These are what used to be known as the Broad sheets and they offer way better reporting that the tabloids, such as The mail.

OK I'll go with one of the approved sources which essentially mirror's the Mail story

Volcano crisis: Sense vanishes in a puff of ash - Telegraph

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Both were made much worse by over-reliance on an inadequate computer model, which ended up causing unnecessary chaos and misery for hundreds of thousands of people and costing not millions but billions of pounds...

What turned that shower of abrasive volcanic dust from a drama into a crisis was the central flaw in a new international system for responding to such incidents, which was put in place only last September. As everyone now recognises, the emptying of the skies which plunged Europe's airlines into chaos was a grotesque overreaction to the reality of the risks involved.

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How is that different from the Mail account ?

Now it falls on who do you want to believe. The pilots? Or the other Daily Mail story that says that their fighter jets also crashed due to the ash?

I don't see any Daily Mail story that says "fighter jets also crashed due to the ash." Where'd you make that up from?

Regardless of who wins the blame game, it seems undisputed that the grounding was based on computer models. It was guesswork, just like climate change.

Here you go, second piece:
Not crashed but potentially very close.

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Originally Posted by NeedKarma

I guess it depends on who you ask:
Volcanic ash cloud: Pilots warn against 'rash' decisions to allow flights | World news | guardian.co.uk

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European airline pilots warned governments and safety regulators today against making "rash" decisions to allow planes to fly through volcanic ash clouds amid growing pressure from airlines across Europe to create "safe flying corridors" to get flights moving again.

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The Daily Mail is a trash rag, never use it as a definitive source. What do you think about this?
Iceland volcano: RAF suspends Typhoon flight training as ash found in engine | Mail Online

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The military suspended training flights after the Typhoon pilots noticed a sudden and dramatic loss of power in their engines.

Returning to RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire after an exercise, they encountered ash at 30,000 feet - just below the cruising altitude of civilian jets.

'The ash was so thick in one of the aircraft that it was literally scooped up and put in a plastic container,' said a source at the Ministry of Defence.

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Mistype by me, meant to write "almost" instead of "also".

The grounding was based on satellite radar by the way.
BBC News - Satellite views of Iceland volcano
Met Office: Iceland Volcano satellite imagery