Friday, April 16, 2010

Eyjafjallajökull


I really want to visit Iceland someday. It is an island country in the process of being ripped apart by the biggest forces of Nature on earth; how cool is that?

Reading the wikipedia page on the latest volcanic eruption in Iceland is fascinating. The bad news is that it's making life difficult for the 500 or so people who live near the volcano, disrupting air travel all over Europe, and might kill a bunch of sheep via flourine poisoning.

I wonder if all the flourine getting dumped on Europe along with the volcanic ash will give them stronger teeth...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was wondering whether all this might be a bit of an overreaction, until I read this riveting account of a British Airways flight over Indonesia back in 1982.

Not the only one, either. KLM had a very similar incident in 1989.

The good news is that everything ended up OK in both of these flights. But molten glass + jet engines turns out to be not a very good combination.

Gavin Andresen said...

Yeah, volcanic ash is nasty stuff-- we got dusted a couple of times one winter when I lived in Anchorage, Alaska and it made all the snow an ugly gray and got into EVERYTHING.