Eyjafjallajökull Volcano Web cam! (Amazing stuff)

[Ziroc]

The Volcano that is causing the airline issues (Eyjafjallajökull) is STILL at it. I've been watching it, and today it's REALLY shooting ash high into the air.

Eyjafjallajökull is in Iceland, so the daytime would be like 11am till 4pm in EST for the USA.. Check your timezone clock on google to see when its daylight for your area.
(Even at night, you can sometimes see large lava showers shooting into the air from the caldera)

Now this IS Iceland, so it can be really cloudy. If you can't see the volcano because of clouds, try again another time. There is another Cam also.

http://eldgos.mila.is/eyjafjallajokull-fra-hvolsvelli/
(Sometimes the webfeed doesn't load fast-traffic I guess)


The MUCH larger quiet volcano, Katla is not active.. but in historic records, every time Eyjafjallajökull erupted, Katla did shortly afterwards.
Katla's Magma chamber is 30 times larger, and if it did go off, it would cause massive flooding locally, world wide weather changes, a LOT more
airliner cancellations and worse. Sounds fun, eh?

What is scary, is there have been recent earthquakes under Katla. Which is extremely rare.

Just another day on earth!

[Olorin]

Cool link!

YouTube is also a great place to look for eruption videos too.

I've got a few on there from a field trip we took to Kilauea when I was in grad school. The eruption is a little less explosive than the current Iceland eruption, and we were able to hike right up next to active flows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAVAevf8AM8



I even did some of my own lava sampling (yes it was hot!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vamQSC74lq4



I did a presentation for one class on the dangers of volcanic ash. Interestingly enough, while jets are at high risk flying through ash clouds, older prop planes fare much better. In one case, researchers wanted to get in situ measurements of the ash cloud composition and flew over a dozen sorties into an active ash cloud using a prop plane. The damage to the plane consisted of scouring of paint off the leading edges, lots of scratching to the windshield (which they countered by applying a thin film like today's screen protectors that could be replaced after each flight). They also filtered the oil in between each flight to remove ash particles.

The reason that jets fare far worse in an ash cloud is because the jet engines burn hot enough to remelt the ash particles that pass through the engine. The molten droplets then deposit on the exhaust vents and cool, plugging up the exhaust and reducing air flow through the engine, potentially causing a stall. Because prop engines operate at a lower temperature, the damage from the ash is limited to abrasion damage--though prolonged exposure would probably cause engine failure due to ash particles contaminating the oil.

My sister lives in Quito, and after the airport had ash dumped on it by Reventador several years back, it took them over two weeks to allow jets to fly again, but prop planes were using the airport just a few days later. The two weeks was because they didn't have much heavy equipment to use for ash removal--a lot of it was done by guys with brooms; and of course they couldn't speed things up by airlifting in heavy equipment because the airport was closed.

[Ziroc]

Here is a pretty recent satellite image of the ash trail!

BTW, yeah, a few years ago I saw some data on what the ash/micro glass particulates do to turbine engines. It's crazy. like you said, the heat melts the glass rock, and it hardens on the turbine blades causing failure of thrust and fire shoots out the back of the engine. Scary stuff.

A few documented cases of large passenger planes went through ash clouds, and both lost engine power until 300 tries to turn them back on at a lower altitude (out of the ash cloud). very lucky..

The dangers of Katla would be the larger quantities of CO₂. This caused a large famine in eastern Europe, and had a possible hand in the French Revolution. Wild stuff.

Potatoes also became a primary crop as well.