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You are > Home > Volcano chaos the story of the year
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Thursday, April 29, 2010
Volcano chaos the story of the year
BY FINBARR SLATTERY
THERE is no doubt but that the biggest news story of the year to date must be the disruption caused to air traffic by volcanic dust spouted into the air by a volcano in Iceland – a country that is rarely in the news.
I remember seeing a few visitors to Killarney from Iceland a few years back – somebody pointed them out to me as they crossed Main Street from the Market Cross.
To me the most famous Icelander must the original compere of Mastermind, Magnus Magnusson, who once he had started to ask a question, had to finish it without causing a time penalty. He was succeeded by the present compere, John Humphreys. About two years ago, shortly before Magnus died, he presented the Mastermind winner of that year with his trophy.
Now, to return to the volcanic ash that is causing such havoc. I couldn’t better the description of what’s happening than the words contained in the editorial headed "The Icelandic Plume" as is appeared in the International Herald Tribune on April 20:
It read: "When severe storms blow through, meteorologists can track their path and predict with considerable confidence when the disturbance will end. Volcanoes don’t blow through. Even with all of the sophisticated monitoring technology and expertise, no one knows when the eruptions at Eyjafjallajokull – the Icelandic volcano now venting ash into the atmosphere — will subside.
"That uncertainty only deepens the sense of helplessness across Europe, where much of the airspace has been closed since late last week, stranding millions of passengers across the globe. Even President Obama had to forgo his planned trip to Poland for Sunday’s funeral of President Lech Kaczynski.
Like the ash cloud, the economic costs of this eruption are immense.
"The airlines, which estimate that they have lost about a billion dollars worldwide, are pressing officials to allow at least some flights to resume. For all that, the physical damage is minute, especially when compared with the recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China. Luckily it has taken no lives."
What Eyjafjallajokull has done above all is force upon us a visceral awareness of our interconnected world — woven together by the crisscrossing of airline routes. For all of the talk of globalisation, we see what a global construct our sense of normality really is.
With luck, the volcano will simmer down soon and the ash plume will disperse. Flights will resume, business will begin to make up its losses, and weary travellers will safely find their way home.
It will be a long time before we forget the threat that lies smoldering under an Icelandic glacier or its lesson that even in the 21st century, our lives are still at the sufferance of nature.
Had the Bard himself a volcanic eruption in mind when he wrote:
‘Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; and the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch’d and vex’d
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb.’
The volcanic eruption in Iceland certainly tested a good few passengers on board the good ship, Earth.
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