Iceland is the tiny land mass at the top.
World Distribution of Mid-Oceanic Ridges; USGS
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Iceland
The ridge was central in the
breakup of Pangaea that began
some 180 million years ago.
SOURCE: Mid-Atlantic Ridge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_Ridge
Never have liked the 18....it’s just butt ugly.
Finland has an air force? Who knew!
Sorry for interrupting the thread with a post on the geology of Iceland (and the other unrelated posts that followed). I just find the subject fascinating and thought some others would too. But this obviously wasn’t the place for it.
I don’t recall any of this hysteria after Mt. St. Helens. We know there was an ash cloud because people all along the jet stream were getting ash falling on them. But I recalled no stoppage of flights in and out of Seattle or Portland during that time. If ash was so bad for jet engines (and it’s easy to believe why), how come we had no plane crashes or emergencies when Mt. St. Helens erupted?
Any jet engine mechanic worth his salt could have told those dumbasses that this would have happened.
It’s happened before with commercial airlines as well.
The problem is the cooling channels in the turbine blades in the High Pressure Turbine just behind the combustion chamber. If those get blocked, the blades will overheat and eventually fail, causing any number of catastrophic failures, the most common would be the blades coming apart and destroying the engine.
Some engines also have cooling holes in the combustion chamber liners. If those get blocked, you may have a burn through, into the boundary air layer.