And these.
Posted on 04/20/2010 10:26:27 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Get Ready for Decades of Icelandic Fireworks
Get Ready for Decades of Icelandic Fireworks We're not quite back to the pre-plane era, but air travel over and around the north Atlantic might get a lot more disrupted in the coming years.
Volcanologists say the fireworks exploding from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Iceland, which is responsible for the ash cloud that is grounding all commercial flights across northern Europe, may become a familiar sight. Increased rumblings under Iceland over the past decade suggest that the area is entering a more active phase, with more eruptions and the potential for some very large bangs.
"Volcanic activity on Iceland appears to follow a periodicity of around 50 to 80 years. The increase in activity over the past 10 years suggests we might be entering a more active phase with more eruptions," says Thorvaldur Thordarson, an expert on Icelandic volcanoes at the University of Edinburgh, UK. By contrast, the latter half of the 20th century was unusually quiet.
Along with increased volcanism, more seismic activity has been recorded around Iceland, including the magnitude-6.1 quake that rocked Reykjavik in May 2008.
(Excerpt) Read more at io9.com ...
Airborne volcanic ash is such a rare threat to air travel that no one's bothered to invest the time, effort, and money to develop an ash-proof aircraft engine.
I'd be interested to hear the ideas of some aviation engineers as to how you would design such an engine. They'd have to invent a whole new air filtration technology to keep the ash out of the intakes.
And ash in the engines isn't the only problem. At the speeds that jet liners travel, airborne ash can scour the paint right off the airframe and pit the windshields so badly that they turn white.
It can also incapacitate the aircraft's instruments, which also blinds the pilots.
Lotta stuff to overcome, there.
That's where my money is.
Well, we flew to the moon for some reason. Part of the rationale for that was we’d get some great technological advances just in the doing.
I’m not advocating government spending, but volcanos are forseeable. I understand why private industry might not want to design aircraft for that contingency, but since the government does seem to waste money, we’re looking at something that some government might want to look into spending money on. Skip the global warming bs. Global warming is good. If it gets 1 degree hotter, and a volcano makes it 1 degree cooler, it’s all good.
Well, there are accurate historical records on previous eruptions of Icelandic volcanoes going back a thousand years. The historical records also show where the fallout and major effects downwind occurred, as well, because the Europeans recorded these events.
From what I've read, there's only a small "if" factor involved with these volcanoes. They have an established eruptive periodicity of about two hundred years, per the reports I've read. The last big eruption happened early in the nineteenth century and lasted for almost two years. These latest eruptions are right on schedule.
Geologic records show that they've erupted with a fair amount of regularity for millenia.
Maybe we'll get lucky this time and this will only be a minor event, but the geologic record says that's not likely. Read the article. The near-term scenario isn't too promising.
Ships are already invented.
And they can’t fall from the sky.
The space shuttle is fairly sturdy, can any technologies be taken from that?
In a lesson to do what you really want when you have the chance, in 2007 (late) I was going to go to Iceland for vacation. I decided against it an thought I would sneak it in this summer or even Spring 2011. Now it’s not that it is totally out of the question but it’s possible vacations in general, food prices and human existence are going to be affected greatly.
Do it when you have the money and time and just DO IT. Or you may not get the chance (or the landscape you wanted to photograph may be significantly altered.)
People think that because we’re all modern and everything that those old timey bad things like plagues and pandemics and very bad geologic events such as severe volcanoes won’t happen any more.
Wrong answer. They will. Now? Next year? 100 years? Looks as though this volcanic thing might indeed be a destructive thing.
The other aspect is that because things are all modern and whatnot, if one card goes down, many other cards go down. in earlier times the interconnected stuff wasn’t there, and people were self sufficient in smaller areas. One card going down didn’t mean 100 other cards went down.
Odd that with this Iceland volcano stuff going on regularly like this (if it is) nobody thought to rank this up with major world concerns until oops, air travel was knocked out.
My opinion is that this problem should be solved by private industry. It’s their planes, and their shareholders making the profits from air travel, so let them overcome it.
But, if someone’s going to commit taxpayer dollars to solving it, then let it be some other country’s taxpayers. We’ve given the world plenty of technology already. It’s our turn to be on the receiving end for a change.
The only reason that this is suddenly such an urgent problem is that these particular volcanoes blow their ash high into the stratosphere where jets normally fly, and the fact that if they follow their historical behavior, they could be blowing for up to two years. Also, it’s where the ash from these volcanoes winds up — over Northern and Western Europe.
Doubtful. They use solid rocket boosters to lift them into space. That's not a propellant that's particularly applicable to terrestrial aircraft technology. Once you light it, there's no shutting it down.
I'm sure there's a technological answer. I just don't know what it is.
Let’s take a cruise to Chicago this year, dear.
I don’t really have a good feel about how big a problem this could be. I know that planes could be flying and aren’t.
I don’t really like the sound of “well this could be a catastrophe, but we’ll let private industry handle it” I’ve seen plenty of movies where meteors or comets hit the earth. We should have a solution ready for that.
And these.
Well, doesn’t the space shuttle withstand intense heat on re-entry? Perhaps it’s built to withstand little chunks of volcano ash as well. Or, whatever is out there in space that’s much worse - sharper, moving through space much faster, whatever. If the windshield glass is a problem, use space shuttle technologies to make the windshield glass more scratch resistant. Figure out all the potential problems with airplanes and volcanic ash and see what can be fixed.
Wrong answer. They will.
Absolutely. The last two to four thousand years have been relatively quiet for this planet, and that quiet allowed human civilization to flower, grow, and advance to the present stage. There were other epochs in which the human race was nearly wiped out because of natural events such as this.
For instance, if Yellowstone volcano were to erupt in this age, it would nearly mean the end of civilization as we know it, it would cause such planet-wide devastation.
If the Chixilub asteroid were to hit the planet today, it would probably destroy all human and animal life. It killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Like I said, it's been relatively quiet on the planet for the last several thousand years, and that's the only reason we're here.
...because things are all modern and whatnot, if one card goes down, many other cards go down. in earlier times the interconnected stuff wasn’t there, and people were self sufficient in smaller areas.
Yep. In ancient times, if a volcanic eruption completely wiped out the people in one region, those in unaffected regions would go on as if nothing happened. Today, there'd be a ripple effect of such devastation all around the world.
I'm sure there are vulcanologists who tried to make governments listen to their warnings, but no one's perfected the science of exact volcanic eruption prediction, so no one listened.
Even if governments had listened, and were fully apprised of the situation, what were they supposed to do about it? In this case, I think they did all that can be reasonably expected.
It’s all very interesting.
Makes me glad I live in the woods with a well and firewood and all that stuff.
Not that I want to live forever, just don’t like cities anyway, and any kind of Black Swan even can turn things chaotic faster than anyone can imagine.
Are you certain that those planes could be flying those air routes that cross the path of the ash cloud? Have you ever seen or read about what volcanic ash does to jet airplane engines?
The ash is in the air at the altitudes and within the air lanes where these planes need to fly. Believe me, you can't just tough it through a volcanic ash cloud. It's suicide.
I read today that limited flights were supposed to start up again in Northern and Western Europe. Don't know if the ash cloud moved off enough for them to do that or not. If it didn't, then they're still grounded.
I’ve seen plenty of movies where meteors or comets hit the earth. We should have a solution ready for that.
Scientists and other thinkers have been trying to dream up a technology to handle that scenario for some time, but there are technological limitations that need to be overcome. I agree that governments ought to be funding research to design and build a technology to handle the threat of large objects from space. If there's anything that can kill off the whole human race, that's it.
Yes, but the space shuttle is essentially a glider that re-enters the earth's atmosphere nose up, with its belly exposed to the heat of re-entry. The belly is covered with heat-resistant tiles, but not the rest of the orbiter.
That technology won't help us with designing a jet engine that can ingest volcanic ash and keep running.
If the windshield glass is a problem, use space shuttle technologies to make the windshield glass more scratch resistant.
The windows on the space shuttle aren't any more scratch resistant than the windows on a 747. They're not meant to resist the pummeling of re-entry.
Building an ash-proof airplane is going to require some new technology.
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