Air travel at Iceland's main international airport has been suspended after a volcano erupted there yesterday sending a plume of of ash, smoke and steam 12 miles into the atmosphere. As such, a no-fly zone has been put into effect 120 nautical miles around the eruption, whose debris seems to be headed away from the rest of Europe. The Grimsvotn eruption comes a year after a cloud of ash from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano there brought air travel on the continent to a standstill.
The Grimsvotn volcano, which lies under the uninhabited Vatnajokull glacier about 120 miles east of the capital, Reykjavik, began erupting Saturday for the first time since 2004. A University of Iceland geophysicist, Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson, said the new eruption is 10 times as powerful as the one in 2004, which lasted for several days and briefly disrupted international flights, and may be the volcano's largest eruption in 100 years.
However this volcano is expected to have a much smaller effect on international travel than the one last year. Geophysicist Pall Einarsson explained to the AP that "the ash in Eyjafjallajokull was persistent or unremitting and fine-grained. The ash in Grimsvotn is more coarse and not as likely to cause danger as it falls to the ground faster and doesn't stay as long in the air as in the Eyjafjallajokull eruption."
Volcanic activity on Iceland is nothing new, especially at the Grimsvotn volacno, which before 2004 previously went boom in 1998, 1996 and 1993. Those times its eruptions lasted between a day and several weeks.
Finally, here's some video of yesterday's plume:
