Fears of more flight chaos as Iceland sees new eruption

Safety experts warned yesterday that ash from an erupting Icelandic volcano that closed the country's airspace may blow across large swathes of western Europe, raising fears of new flight chaos.

Air safety officials said ash from the Grimsvoetn eruption may reach north Scotland by tomorrow before sweeping across Britain to hit France and Spain two days later, as experts said the impact should not be as far-reaching as 2010 when a similar event caused widespread flight cancellations.

Ash deposits were sprinkled over the capital Reykjavik yesterday, some 400 kilometres to the west of the volcano which spewed a cloud about 20 kilometres into the sky.

Residents living near to Grimsvoetn said that the skies had turned black in an eerie echo of the impact of last year’s eruption of the smaller Eyjafjoell volcano which led to the biggest global airspace shutdown since World War II.

“It’s just black outside, and you can hardly tell it is supposed to be bright daylight,” Bjorgvin Hardarsson, a farmer at Hunbakkar Farm in the nearby village of Kirkjubaejarklaustur said.

Grimsvoetn, Iceland’s most active volcano located at the heart of its biggest glacier Vatnajoekull, began erupting late on Saturday.

Ash soon covered nearby villages and farms and by yesterday morning invisible deposits had reached the capital, prompting Iceland’s airport authority, Isavia, to announce the main airport Keflavik was shutting.The airspace closure “affects pretty much all of Iceland right now, ... Flights to and from Iceland are shutting down,” Isavia spokesman Hjordis Gudmundsdottir said, adding that flight routes to the north of the North Atlantic island nation might also be affected.

However, she stressed, the fact that winds were blowing the ash to the north were far better than last year’s eruption of Eyjafjoell, when a massive cloud of ash was blown to the south and southeast over mainland Europe. Elin Jonasdottir, an aviation expert at the Icelandic Meteorologist Office, said that while the eruption had lost some of its initial intensity, it was too soon to predict how long the danger would last.

Mr Jonasdottir said that although the current altitude was only half of its height on Saturday, the plume usually hits a peak after an eruption begins and so it was not an indication that it was tapering off.

“The plume is reaching above the tropopause (the atmospheric boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere) where most of weather happens, so there is still a danger that the ash can travel.”

By late morning yesterday, no other European countries had decided to close their airspace.

Recent eruptions

Iceland, an island of 103,000 square kilometres in the north Atlantic near to the Arctic Circle, has both numerous volcanoes and the largest glaciers in Europe, with ice covering around 12 per cent of the country.

The main eruptions of the past 15 years:

• May 21: Iceland’s biggest and most active sub-glacial volcano, the Grimsvoetn, below the country’s largest glacier Vatnajoekull, begins erupting, sending a plume of smoke and ash as high as 20 kilometres into the air, forcing Iceland to temporarily shut its airspace the next day amid fears of a repeat of flight chaos caused by the Eyjafjoell eruption a year earlier.

• April 14, 2010: The Eyjafjoell volcano, under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in the south of the country, shoots a massive plume of ash high into the sky that peaks at around nine kilometres and blowing across to mainland Europe. The ash cloud caused the planet’s biggest airspace shutdown since World War II amid fears the volcanic ash could wreak havoc on aircraft engines.

• March 21, 2010: Fimmvorduhals, a crater on the flank of the Eyjafjoell volcano located around 150 kilometres to the southeast of Reykjavik, erupts, causing the brief evacuation of some 600 residents. Its spectacular lava falls, which last for three weeks, draw tourists and even chefs who cook over the molten rock.

• November 1-5, 2004: An eruption takes place under the glacial lake of Grimsvoetn in the western part of the Vatnajokull glacier, causing a spurt of volanic matter up to 13 kilometres high.

• February 26-March 8, 2000: The 1,490-metre Hekla volcano, one of Iceland’s best known, sends a plume of smoke and ash 10 kilometres high.

• December 18-28, 1998: Iceland’s biggest and most active sub-glacial volcano, the Grimsvoetn, erupts for the second time in two years, creating a 1,300-metre fissure which allows huge quantities of molten ice to pour into an underground lake.

• September 9-October 13, 1996: The Grimsvoetn volcano bursts through the glacier above it to expel some 500 million square meters of lava. The following month meltwater bursts from the glacier with unprecedented force, carrying away several bridges and a road before pouring into the sea.