More flight chaos as Iceland sees new eruption

Iceland: Safety experts warned Sunday that ash from an erupting Icelandic volcano that closed the country’s airspace may blow across large swathes of western Europe, raising fears of new flight chaos.

Air safety officials said ash from the Grimsvoetn eruption may reach north Scotland by Tuesday before sweeping across Britain to hit France and Spain two days later.

But experts said the impact should not be as far-reaching as 2010, when a similar event caused widespread flight cancellations. Ash deposits were sprinkled over the capital Reykjavik Sunday, some 400 kilometres (250 miles) to the west of the volcano, which has spewed an ash cloud about 20 kilometres into the sky.

Less than 24 hours after the eruption began late Saturday, experts and authorities in Iceland said the volcanic activity had begun to decline.

That has raised hopes that the ash plume might not be big enough to cause much trouble once the winds change.

“It has been declining now a bit since this morning,” Magnus Tummi Gudmundsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, told AFP late Sunday. He stressed however that the eruption, with its column of smoke still stretching some 10 kilometres into the air, remained powerful. “It will have to decline considerably more before we can consider it of no danger,” he said.

Whether it will cause air travel chaos or not “will depend on the power of the eruption and the strength of the winds,” he added.

Fortunately, Gudmundsson said, so far “the winds are not nearly as strong as last time around.” On that occasion, in April 2010, the nearby Eyjafjoell volcano erupted, spewing a massive cloud of ash that caused the planet’s biggest airspace shutdown since World War II.

“This time it is probably going to be more local.” Oli Thor Arnason, a meteorologist at the Icelandic Meteorological Office, agreed.

AFP