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New volcano eruption begins in Iceland: meteorologists

By Agnes Valdimarsdottir

The Grimsvoetn volcano under Iceland's largest glacier began erupting Saturday, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said, reporting a tall plume of smoke rising from the crater.

"
An eruption at Grimsvoetn has started and there's an airplane on its way there now to investigate further,"
Haraldur Eirkisson of the office told AFP.

"
There was a cloud rising up from Grimsvoetn around 1900 GMT and at just before 2000 GMT it had reached an altitude of 11 kilometres (6.8 miles),"
he added.

Another meteorologist at the same office, Fridjon Magnusson, told AFP less than two hours later that the column of smoke had swelled to reach an altitude of 20 kilometres.

Grimsvoetn is Iceland's most active volcano, having erupted nine times between 1922 and 2004. It lies beneath the Vatnajoekull glacier in the southeast of the North Atlantic island nation.

The eruption in April last year of Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano, southwest of Grimsvoetn, shut down large swathes of European airspace for almost a month amid fears the volcanic ash could wreak havoc on aircraft engines.

No two volcanic eruptions are the same, and it remained unclear late Saturday if the new eruption threatened to emit a similar kind of ash -- fine, with very sharp particles -- like the massive plume that burst from Eyjafjoell.

"
The eruption has not yet spread very far, and is still looming over the Vatnajoekull glacier,"
Magnusson pointed out.

"
These are just the first few hours of the eruption. We can't say yet whether this will have an effect on air traffic like Eyjafjoell,"
he added.

The problem with last year's eruption, which caused the planet's biggest air space shutdown since World War II, was according to the researchers that it happened under a glacier, bursting through 200-300 metres (yards) of ice.

It was the "
interaction between the cold water and the hot magma that made the particles really tiny,"
and therefore especially dangerous to aircraft, Susan Stipp, a professor at the Nano-Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen, told AFP late last month.

"
The (ash) particles were small so they went high and far. They were sharp, so they were a danger to airplane windows. It's like sand-blasting the airplane. And they were small and could melt at temperatures common in jet engines ... and could cause failure,"
she told AFP.

While Saturday's eruption had sent smoke high in the sky, Magnusson pointed out that there so far was only "
heavy ash at the bottom of the bloom (that) has not reached high heights."


Bjarni Steinthorsson, a farmer who lives near the Vatnajoekull glacier, meanwhile told the Morgunbladid daily's website small amounts of ash had begun falling in the area and "
the snow is getting darker."


He said that he expected more ash to fall overnight, although what happened would depend on the direction of the winds, which were currently almost still at the eruption site.

Iceland's State Road Authority meanwhile announced late Saturday it had temporarily closed a road near the glacier that is part of the national highway system.

Grimsvoetn is also located under a glacier, in an enormous, eight-kilometre (five-mile) diameter caldera -- a collapsed volcanic crater -- near the centre of the Vatnajoekull icefield.

When it last erupted in November 2004, volcanic ash fell as far away as mainland Europe and caused minor disruptions in flights to and from Iceland.

Geologists had worried late last year the volcano was about to blow when they noticed a large river run caused by rapidly melting glacier ice.

Eruptions at Grimsvoetn traditionally result in massive flooding, although this has little impact since the surrounding areas are uninhabited.

When the tsunami hit Japan, we had a bunch of 'experts' say that there was no similar threat to the UK nuclear facilities on the UK coastline because we were not in an earthquake area and therefore tsunamis are extremely unlikely. Surely such volcanic activity can produce earthquakes, hence Tsunamis. Tsunamis travel right across the Pacific - how can it be they cannot travel the short distace from Icelend to the UK? What are the UK nuclear tsunami defences like, other than denial? These so called experts are good at telling us all not to worry and that its nothing to worry about but just look at Japan.

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Flights WILL be disrupted tomorrow: Warning as ash cloud from Icelandic volcano 'will drift over Scotland within hours'

* Foreign Secretary insists there will be no blanket ban on travel
* Britain is better prepared for ash cloud after last year's debacle, William Hague said
* Keflavik airport closed till Monday and 40 international flights cancelled
* Greenland closes airspace, cancelling flights between the Arctic island and Denmark
* Airline shares fell by up to 5 per cent on fears of a repeat of last year's chaos

Flights from parts of the country will be disrupted tomorrow by the ash cloud billowing from a volcano in Iceland, the Civil Aviation Authority has warned.

The Met Office is predicting the plume of ash from the Grimsvotn volcano will begin to drift over parts of Scotland in the next few hours and would cover all of Ireland, Scotland and parts of northern Britain by 6am tomorrow.

Asked whether this would cause some disruption to flights, a CAA spokesman said: 'That's the way it's looking certainly at the moment.'

William Hague, however, has said he does not predict the volcano will not cause the chaos seen a year ago. The Foreign Secretary has said that Britain has more information on how ash clouds move and is less likely to have to enforce a blanket flight ban.

Last April airports across the UK were shut down for five days. With school half-term holidays next week any disruption to UK airports would cause chaos for hundreds of thousands of families.

Europe's air traffic control organisation has said that if volcanic emissions continued at the same rate then the cloud might reach west French airspace and north Spain on Thursday.

Authorities have backed more relaxed rules on flying through ash after being criticised for being too strict last time.

Then, closing European air space forced the cancellation of 100,000 flights, disrupted 10 million passengers and cost the industry an estimated $1.7 billion in lost revenues.

'I think the regulators are a bit more sensible than they were last year,' Michael O'Leary, chief of budget airline Ryanair, told a conference call. "
We would be cautiously optimistic that they won't balls it up again this year.'

Nevertheless, airline shares fell between 3 to 5 percent.

Iceland’s airports were closed and domestic flights cancelled yesterday as a spectacular 12-mile high mushroom cloud of ash, steam and smoke filled the sky.

German Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer said he did not expect the eruption to disrupt air traffic to the same degree as last year, adding however there would be a flight ban for jet planes should particles from the ash cloud reach a higher concentration than 2 milligrammes per cubic meter.

And speaking to Sky News, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond said authorities could hopefully work with airlines to 'enable them to fly around concentrations of ash rather than having to impose a blanket closure'.

oday, Greenland partially closed its airspace, leading to the cancelling of flights between Copenhagen and the Arctic island's main airport.

Authorities in the UK initially said there was little chance of disruption to airspace. But as a low pressure weather system moves into Europe, there are fears north-westerly winds capable of blowing ash towards Britain will pick up.

Foreign Secretary William Hague told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday that Britain has more information on how ash clouds move and is less likely to have to enforce a blanket flight ban.

Airlines were told to brace for the possible further spread of ash later in the week. A spokesman for the Met Office, which runs the UK’s Volcanic Ash Advisory Centres, said: ‘It depends on how long the volcano continues to erupt and the weather patterns that develop.

‘If it continues to erupt, there is a risk of volcanic ash over Britain later in the week.’

The CAA said lessons had been learned from last year when fine ash from another Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, shut European airspace for a week.

The no-fly zone – imposed after fears that ash could clog up aircraft engines – cost up to £2billion and led to disruption for ten million passengers.

Airlines claimed the rules were too strict and their planes could cope with low concentrations of fine grained dust.