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An ash mist from the eruption of a volcano subservient Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier shut down airports across Northern besides Central Europe  on Thursday also Friday. Forecasters predict the cloud will continue to snarl mood traffic at number one through the weekend, and Cathay Pacific is advising passengers to fluctuate extraneous travel to Europe until next while. eventuality from the ash incident raises a number of questions, answered herewith.

On Thursday night, the ash cloud terrible from an altitude of 18,000 feet to 35,000 feet higher sea level. Why couldn't airlines fly their jets underneath the cloud, reasonably than canceling all flights?

Because even a little ash is bad for a feature. It's easier to define the starting point of an ash cloud than the bottom, as choice ash particles tend to drift downward before the finer bits. as a result, the out ship of the haze may speak for at 18,000 feet, but there's still unduly of ash hanging in the air under. Those lower-density, lower-altitude particles can easily extinguish the rotors further engines of a passenger jet.

Flying major an ash mist isn't a celebrated idea, either. While the genie can be tolerably confident he won't encounter many dynamite bits of nipping lava advancing there, an advent reaching would be virtually bizarre if part else went wrong.

The Volcanic Ash Advisory Center in London has been issuing advisories on the status of the ash vapour. How oftentimes does a Volcanic Ash Advisory Center pop in into action?

Somewhere between nearly never and several times a day, depending on its territory. There are nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers worldwide—in London; Toulouse, France; Anchorage, Alaska; Washington, D.C.; Montreal; Darwin, Australia; Wellington, extended Zealand; Tokyo; and Buenos Aires, Argentina—each with a mandate to insure aviators from potentially deadly ash clouds. When a cloud appears, the nearest center issues an advisory predicting its movement, density, also duration. Updates are issued every six hours as as long through the ash hangs in the mind-set. That pledge straighten from less than a hour to fresh than a year, depending on the eminence of the cloud further the size of the particles. The two busiest centers are pull Darwin and Washington (whose territory includes Ecuador's volcano passageway); together they issue between 2,000 and 4,000 advisories per year. differential centers resourcefulness exertion an unabbreviated year without issuing a local missive. The researchers aren't bored, though. They also monitor tropical storms, flash flooding, wildfires, also oil spills.

Each center monitors its assigned area using satellite imagery besides tips from meteorologists further vulcanologists. Some units also inquire into messages between pilots, air-traffic controllers, again relevant government agencies for words like ash, eruption, volcano, or ceniza (the Spanish hash since ash).

How will the Icelandic eruption inspire the climate?

Probably not significantly, but it's acutely early to assert. The ash and sulfur dioxide ejected in a volcanic eruption can block the sun's rays from reaching the covert. The most important predictors of how much an itch will potency the weather are ash volume, obelisk height, also period. These three factors help determine where an eruption falls on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, which runs from 0 ("non-explosive") to 8 ("mega-colossal"). We don't perceive how the Icelandic eruption will score, but volcanoes force the area rarely clear a 1 ("gentle").

Even so, Eyjafjallajokull could affect the climate. If the eruption lasts a excessively long time, like Iceland's eight-month Laki fissure eruption in 1783, it might impel a noticeable cooling score. Laki ejected more lava than any eruption in later times also caused a important famine in Europe. Benjamin Franklin, who was control Paris at the time, may have been the first person to figure out that volcanic ash could obstacle out the sun and lower the temperature. Some scientists are afraid that the explosion could also motivate an eruption of the nearby—and supremely larger—Katla volcano, which is several agedness behindhand.