1、The Cloud That Closed A ContinentAs volcanic eruptions go, Icelands Eyjafjallajokull wont break the records. Icelanders dismiss the normally sleepy Eyjafjallajokull as a “weary old man,” and in fact few people outside the volcanology community or the 800 or so Icelandic farmers who needed to be evac
2、uated noticed when the volcano began spewing lava on March 20. Most likely it would have remained that way - a brief tourist attraction and a footnote in a few grad students dissertations before the earth quieted again.But thats not quite what happened. Instead, on April 14, a new and stronger erupt
3、ion on Eyjafjallajokull exploded through a glacial ice cap, throwing a vast plume of volcanic ash around 7 miles (11 km) into the atmosphere, high enough to be carried for thousands of miles. And then, as if on cue, the winds shifted, blowing to the east and south, sending the tower of ash toward no
4、rthern Europe and some of the most crowded airspace on the planet. “It was an eruption at the right place at the right time,” says Marcus Bursik, a volcanologist at the University at Buffalo. “Or, I guess, really, the other way around.”Indeed, for anyone attempting to travel to, from or within Europ
5、e - or anyone who owns stock in an airline - it was definitely the wrong place at the wrong time. Because volcanic ash can ruin the jet engines of aircraft, European air-traffic controllers began shutting down the continents airspace as the high-altitude cloud loomed. By April 15, planes were ground
6、ed and the skies above Europes cities were eerily quiet. As the cloud metastasized across the continent, nervous bureaucrats kept much of its airspace closed for almost five days, resulting in the cancellation of more than 100,000 flights and the stranding of hundreds of thousands of travelers in ai
7、rports around the world. With a third of the industry down, it was the worst global travel disruption since World War II, as the lifeline wed all come to take for granted was suddenly snapped.” These are extraordinary circumstances beyond all airlines control,” says Willie Walsh, CEO of British Airw
8、ays, which was losing up to $30 million a day during the shutdown.But the impact of the volcanic crisis went far beyond the inconvenience of stranded vacationers and the sprained tongues of newscasters trying to pronounce Eyjafjallajokull. (For the record, its Ey-ya-fyat-lah-yoh-kuht.) The airline i
9、ndustry, already pummeled by the recession, has lost nearly $2 billion. TUI Travel, Europes biggest tour operator, had 100,000 customers marooned overseas and was losing $9 million a day as it scrambled to get them home. Kenyan farmers, who supply one-third of Europes fresh flowers, were losing $2 m
10、illion a day as their blooms withered on Nairobi runways. Transplants of bone marrow - which needs to be implanted within 72 hours of harvesting, or else the cells will die - were delayed, putting cancer patients lives at risk. Hundreds of runners from overseas were unable to make it to the starting
11、 line of the Boston Marathon on April 19, including Moroccan Olympian Abdellah Falil, who was stuck in Paris. Oxford University bigwigs, in New York for a biannual outreach weekend, wondered how to get back home for the summer term, and world leaders couldnt fly to Poland for the funeral of Polish P
12、resident Lech Kaczynski on April 18. “Its nature,” says Joy Martinez, 29, a New Yorker who shifted her wedding at the last minute from France to Bali because of the volcano. “And you cant fight nature.”Understanding why Eyjafjallajokull has wreaked such havoc on Europe requires a little basic volcan
13、ology - which volcanologists, thoroughly enjoying their week in the spotlight, are only too happy to provide. Eyjafjallajokull means “island mountain glacier” in Icelandic, and the top of the ice cap covers the volcanos peak. The ice is the thing: the weight of the glacier atop the volcano helps the
14、 magma inside build to a higher pressure, so on April 14, when the mountain had its second eruption, it blew with enough force to send volcanic gases and ash miles into the sky. And the cold water from the melted ice quickly chilled the lava, fragmenting it into tiny glass particles that could be ca
15、rried away in the plume. (Thats what ash really is - not rock dust but little shreds of silica.) The ash plume reached the troposphere, some 35,000 ft. (almost 11 km) up, high enough to hang at the altitude where passenger planes cruise and high enough to be blown to northern Europe and beyond. “Its
16、 a minor eruption in the grand scheme of things,” says Jon Davidson, an earth scientist at Durham University in Britain. “But there was a conspiracy of factors that made it worse.” Ice and wind were just two of those factors; our dependence on air travel was the other. If you wanted to turn a $300 m
17、illion jumbo jet into scrap metal, you couldnt find a faster way to do it than flying it through the heart of a volcanic cloud. Heavy ash can sandblast the windows, leaving them impossible to see through. But the real threat is to the jet engines: ash is sucked into the hot combustion chamber, where
18、 it melts into molten glass, clogging the machinery, degrading the fan blades and potentially causing the engine to flame out. Thats exactly what happened to a 1982 British Airways flight that ran into an undetected volcanic-ash cloud off Indonesia, losing all four engines before it was able to make
19、 an emergency landing.But even very thin, dispersed ash clouds can badly damage a plane. In 2000 a NASA research jet flew through a high-altitude ash cloud without the pilots realizing it. The flight continued without incident, but when scientists took apart the engines later, they discovered $3.2 m
20、illion worth of damage that could have soon crippled the plane. “Ash can definitely do some real damage to your engines,” says Thomas Grindle, chief of aircraft maintenance at NASAs Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., who wrote a report on the incident. “And we didnt even know it was h
21、appening at the time.” Pilots can fly around or under an ash cloud, but its difficult to measure the exact boundaries of the plume, and as writer and amateur pilot James Fallows puts it, flying at low altitude is “like driving cross-country in first gear.” Airlines have an official zero-tolerance ap
22、proach to volcanic ash, so when scientific models showed the plume spreading across Britain and much of northern Europe in the hours after the eruption, one airport after another benched its planes where they sat. And as the plume lingered over Europe and airports remained closed for two days, then
23、three and then longer, utter travel chaos hit, with hundreds of thousands of people around the world realizing they were stranded far from home - and quite suddenly in the pre-jet era. “These kinds of eruptions happened all the time in the past,” says Dougal Jerram, an earth scientist at Durham Univ
24、ersity. “But the disruption is a product of how we live today.” And what a disruption, as stranded travelers used every means at their disposal to make it home. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, returning from San Francisco, was forced to fly to Grand Forks, N.D., then to Lisbon, then to Rome, and th
25、en travel by car and bus to Germany - an odyssey that took nearly three days. The British government sent warships from the Royal Navy to pick up stranded vacationers in Spain, while English TV host Dan Snow used Twitter to organize a second Dunkirk evacuation across the Channel for Brits stuck in C
26、alais, France. (It didnt go as well as the first. French immigration officials put a quick stop to the rescue.) Travelers crowded train and bus stations, hoping to get scarce tickets home - or to one of the few European airports that were still operating. To make it back to New York City from London
27、, Kate Winn, a TV executive with the A scientists cant easily measure how dense a plume really is, nor is there any set limit for how much ash a plane can safely fly through. More research is needed - something Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who once famously mocked the federal spending of million
28、s of dollars on volcano monitoring, might want to remember. “If we spend $100 million now, we might actually be able to prevent events that would cost billions,” says Benjamin Edwards, head of the earth-sciences department at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. But theres a deeper lesson to Eyjafjallajokull: the earth can still surprise us. As complicated as our transcontinental supply chains and holidays have become, a single shrug from the planet can disrupt everything and leave us marooned far from home.
