Air trauma may last months

New Delhi: Even as the airspace over Europe remained closed for the fourth day running on Sunday, and thousands of air passengers remained stranded, experts expressed fears that the ash released by Iceland’s erupting volcano might continue to disrupt air operations for weeks and months.
Indian airline companies, however, resumed their flights to the United States by using alternative routes that bypassed Europe altogether.Indian airline companies, however, resumed their flights to the United States by using alternative routes that bypassed Europe altogether.
As eruptions from the volcano continued to spew ash into the atmosphere, experts said only a heavy shower could bring them to a halt and enable airlines to resume operations.
The last time the crater, Ejyafjallajokull, erupted was in 1821, when it went on expelling lava for more than a year. There are also fears that another Icelandic volcano, Katla, said to be five times bigger, could become active as well.
“Our work suggests that eventually there will be either somewhat larger or more frequent eruptions in Iceland in coming decades,” Freysteinn Sigmundsson of the Nordic Volcanological Centre in Iceland told The Telegraph, London.
"While volcanic eruptions can be predicted, there is no way to predict how long they will continue. The eruption of Ejyafjallajokull had been predicted,” Professor D Chandrasekharam, former head of the department of earth sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, told Hindustan Times.
18/04/10 Tushar Srivastava/Hindustan Times

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Categories: Foreign Apr 2010, Indian Aviation- In General Apr 2010