Iceland volcano: eruption 'could just be rehearsal' for worse ash chaos if Katla blows

Iceland's powerful Katla volcano is a brooding reminder that Britain and Europe face even worse chaos unless they learn lessons from the ash eruption at Eyjafjallajökull. 

By Philip Sherwell on Katla volcano, southern Iceland
Published: 5:39PM BST 24 Apr 2010 

On the first official day of Icelandic summer, a bitter sub-zero wind whipped newly-fallen snow across the majestic mountain glacier that enveloped the crater of the Katla volcano.
The solitude and serenity was disturbed only by the rumbles from its cloud-shrouded and now notorious neighbour Eyjafjallajökull, whose violent eruptions paralysed international air travel for a remarkable week.

The choking plumes of ash that Eyjafjallajökull is spewing out may have slowly diminished, but the volcano is still managing to mount some spectacular displays against dramatic backdrops of lightning showers and the Northern Lights.
And as recriminations about the handling of the great ash debacle deepen in tandem with the gradual recovery from its impact, Katla is a brooding reminder that the Land of Fire and Ice could soon deliver an even more explosive shock to the world.
A Sunday Telegraph reporter and photographer were the first journalists to set foot on its glacier since Eyjafjallajökull erupted, edging up to the crater rim at 4,000 ft in a Land Rover modified in Iceland to "super Jeep" standards for extreme conditions.
The usually pristine white wilderness was dotted with dirty smudges of crusty ash deposited in recent days. And several miles below the 2,000 ft thick ice field, the magna chambers of a volcano that has some 10 times the power of Eyjafjallajökull are long "overdue" an eruption after an unprecedented 92 years of inactivity.
Fuelling those concerns concerns, Katla, named after a vindictive troll from Viking folklore, has also exploded in the wake of previous eruptions at Eyjafjallajökull. When it last unleashed its fury and ferocity in 1918, glacial floods swept down from the mountain and ash clouds turned day to pitch dark - but the commercial aviation business had of course not been born then.
Sitting atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the fault line where two tectonic plates and are violently tearing themselves apart, Iceland is a smouldering and unpredictable physical presence in the chilly North Atlantic just 500 miles off the Scottish coast.
And in a frank interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the country's president, Olafur Grimsson, a plain-speaking left-wing academic, cited new research by Icelandic volcanologists to warn the country's neighbours to expect more intensified volcanic activity for decades to come.
"The fundamental lesson is that volcanic eruptions will continue to happen in Iceland so we'll all have to learn to live with them and handle them better," he said. "We should treat the events of the last few days as a dress rehearsal for what needs to be done if and when Katla erupts.
"There really need to be extensive plans to deal with these eruptions so that we don't see this sort of chaos and bewilderment and surprise again."
Although he declined to criticise the reactions of Britain and other European countries, he added some pointed observations. "It was only after almost a week that governments woke up to the need to instigate some effective measures," he said.
"The important thing is for governments to remain calm and rational, and not to panic and treat this as some great disaster.
"But in modern societies like Britain and Europe, there has been a disengagement between people and nature. There has been a belief that the forces of nature can't impact the functioning of technologically advanced societies. But in Iceland we learn from childhood that forces of nature are stronger than ourselves and they remind us who are the masters of the universe."
He argued that the aviation industry needed to develop better systems for monitoring ash in the air as well as possibly engines that are less susceptible to its impact.
On the south coast of Iceland, where the distinctive black sandy beaches are a constant reminder of the island's volcanic provenance, the turmoil that Eyjafjallajökull has inflicted on the rest of the world is viewed with some wry amusement.
The eruption is not even regarded as a major event by the standards of an island with 22 active volcanoes.
"Volcanoes are just not the sort of thing that panic us," said Sveinn Palsson, mayor of the small town of Vik that lives in the shadow of Katla and was covered by ash from Eyjafjallajökull. "In Florida, they live with hurricanes. In Iceland, we live with volcanoes."
But his town's location means it would be the first human settlement at risk if Katla does erupt - the contour of the coastline here leaves the community exposed to lethal tidal waves that could follow when the glacial waters crash into the ocean.
The 300 locals regularly practise an evacuation plan to take shelter in homes higher up the hill, said Mr Palsson, whose own house lies in the danger zone. But he demonstrates the unflappable nonchalance of Icelanders confronted by the forces of nature, observing: "The Europeans don't seem to have handled this so well."
Thorun Bjornsdottir is the only living islander to have witnessed the ferocity of Katla when it exploded in 1918, watching as the floodwater swept through lower ground just beneath her father's sheep farm.
"I was seven at the time but I remember it like it was yesterday," recalled the 98-year-old at the family farmhouse where she lives with her 100-year-old husband.
"The ash cloud turned day to night and it was so dark that you could not even see the candle you were carrying. And the floods were terrible. A wall of water came down the valley with waves of about three to four metres [nine to 12 feet]."
In the days before seismic monitoring stations and even electricity, the first sign that locals had that something was amiss came as ground tremors shook the oil lamps hanging on the porch. "An old lady who remembered the last eruption [in the 19th century] told us 'Katla is coming'," she said.
Now the operations rooms at the Iceland Meteorological Office (IMO) in Reykjavik is hooked by computer links to seismometers and GPS stations dotted around the island's volcanoes set to alert them if an eruption is imminent.
Even then, the advance warning may only be a couple of hours - as was the case when a surge of tremors equivalent to an earthquake of 2.7 on the Richter scale rattled the earth around Eyjafjallajökull late on April 13.
Sigurlaug Hjattadottir, an IMO scientist, described the well-honed plan that was put into action as the meteorologist working that night called the duty geophysicist at home. One look at the seismic activity on her computer was enough for her to call the civil defence authorities and alert them that an eruption appeared to be under way.
At this stage, automated text and phone messages went out to the farmers around the volcano telling them to evacuate in the early hours of April 14. As they headed to a community centre in a nearby town, the first choking clouds of ash were thrown out of Eyjafjallajökull high into jetstream winds that carried them across Britain and northern Europe within hours.
Initially, there was a striking acquiescence from stranded passengers and the aviation industry alike - despite the discomfort suffered by the former and losses for the latter - to the no-fly restrictions imposed by European air safety officials and unquestioningly implemented by national authorities.
But last week, the mood rapidly turned as it became clear not only that governments and aviation bodies had little apparent plan for tackling the crisis, but also that the blanket no-fly ban was based on largely theoretical computer models and limited information about the dispersal or volume of the ash and its impact on jet engines.
Iceland supplied information on the plume height, visual evidence about the make-up of the plume of ash and steam and analysis of grain size from ashfall to the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC) in London.
But the country's top volcanologists and meteorologists said that the clearest message of Eyjafjallajökull was that civil aviation authorities and companies needed to develop more accurate models for estimating ash dispersal and impact - especially as Katla could throw up a much greater challenge.
"I would expect a major effort on this front from the aviation industry so they are better prepared for the next time," said Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson, a professor of geophysics and expert in volcanic ice. "The models clearly need to be much improved."
And despite the studied nonchalance of Icelanders about the volcanoes that created Europe's newest land, their primal environment can still surprise them. And Eyjafjallajökull did just that late last week.
It was one of the ironies of the eruption that Iceland's own airspace had been unaffected and its main airport remained open as the towering ash clouds were swept south-east over Europe by the prevailing winds.
That all changed on Friday, however. Just as the rest of the world's airports were returning to normal, the country's international airport near Reykjavik was closed when ash was carried its way. For Iceland at least, Eyjafjallajökull had a sting in its tail.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/iceland/7629066/Iceland-volcano-eruption-could-just-be-rehearsal-for-worse-ash-chaos-if-Katla-blows.html

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