Eyjafjallajökull Awakes
How an Icelandic Volcano Shut Down Europe's Airspace
By SPIEGEL Staff
Sigurdur Gislason pulled off a move in his sports utility vehicle last Thursday that his colleagues considered a real stunt. The 52-year-old geochemist put his foot on the gas and drove right into the cloud enveloping the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.
Gislason knew the volcano might start to fling out rock again at any moment. He knew, too, that lighting might strike out of nowhere. "That can occur in these electrically charged clouds," he explains. Even breathing meant danger, since the micrometer-sized ash particles are as sharp as needles. "It's glass, essentially," Gislason says.
But the Icelandic geochemist's daring paid off. It was pitch black when he stopped the vehicle, putting on a protective mask and a motorcycle helmet. Then he got out and started to scoop the powdery ash from the volcano into high-purity plastic bags.
Wide-Spread Chaos
Gislason didn't know then that the substance he was currently sampling at risk to his own life would shortly trigger the most wide-spread chaos in the history of European transportation. While Eyjafjallajökull did nothing more within Iceland than cause a car bridge to collapse, it brought Europe's aviation industry to its knees 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) away.
One volcano achieved what hurricanes, terrorists and flu viruses never managed -- Heathrow, Paris, Frankfurt, Schiphol and all of Europe's other major hubs came to a standstill on Friday afternoon. Airlines cancelled 17,000 flights, while Frankfurt and Amsterdam airports set up thousands of camp beds. Losses for airlines are estimated at up to a billion dollars.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to interrupt her flight home from a visit to the US, landing in Lisbon instead. A Medevac Airbus air ambulance carrying injured German soldiers home from Afghanistan only made it as far as Istanbul. And British comedian John Cleese of Monty Python fame found himself stuck in Oslo. He hired a taxi and was able to reach Brussels for a fee of €3,800 ($5,100).
"I've worked in the industry for 25 years, but this dwarfs anything else I've experienced up to now -- even the events following September 11," says Michael Garvens, director of Germany's Cologne Bonn Airport. Stranded shipping containers are piling up where normally up to 50 FedEx, DHL and UPS cargo planes arrive every evening. The airport's background noise is no longer roaring jet engines, but twittering birds. "The whole thing is like a lake where the inlets have been cut off and the water is slowly drying up," Garvens says.
Reduced Capacity
This forced shutdown hit the air freight industry at the worst possible time. Many airlines reduced their capacity in the course of the global financial crisis. But after the economy recovered surprisingly quickly, especially in Asia, transport capacity was suddenly tight.
Cell phones and computers were piling up in Hong Kong and Shanghai late this week. Global transportation company Kühne + Nagel is desperately looking for temporary storage space.
Companies everywhere are taking precautions against a worst-case scenario. German engineering giant Siemens used some of the last planes in the air to stock up its replacement parts storage facility in Mississippi, to ensure supplies for clinics and hospitals in the US. Logistics experts at automaker BMW brooded over how they will transport leather seat covers from South Africa to Bavaria if the situation intensifies.
Spouting Ash
It all began midday on Wednesday, when a telephone rang in Exeter, southern England. Icelandic meteorologists were calling to inform their British colleagues at the Met Office, the United Kingdom's national weather service, that Eyjafjallajökull was spouting ash and a cloud of volcanic dust was blowing eastward from Iceland.
The meteorologists immediately put their supercomputer on the job, feeding it measurement data, weather forecasts and satellite images. Fifteen minutes later, they had their first forecast of how the dust cloud would probably spread. A warning was sent out to airlines at 2 p.m., long before the cloud reached the European continent.
On Wednesday evening, a postal airplane in northern Norway first reported swaths of ash over the ocean. On Thursday morning, air traffic authorities closed Scottish airspace. Shortly afterward, the skies above London also experienced a state of quiet such as the city hadn't known in decades.
But perhaps no one was more surprised by the Icelandic volcano's spectacular effect than volcanologists themselves, who are well accustomed to things far worse than Eyjafjallajökull.
Haraldur Sigurdsson, an Icelandic volcanologist, knows the tremors and vibrations of Iceland's volcanoes better than almost anyone else. "Each one has its own character," he says. Eyjafjallajökull, at 700,000 years old, is one of the island's oldest volcanoes, and not very active. "It's more of an introvert," Sigurdsson explains. "I would say: a weary old man."
Yet none other than this old man among volcanoes has managed to create chaos across an entire continent. One factor exacerbating this eruption was the fact that the rising magma mixed with ice in the crater. As the blazing hot lava hit the 200-meter (650-foot) thick glacier, the ice turned explosively to steam. "In the process, the magma was absolutely pulverized," Sigurdsson says.
Weather also conspired against Europe. Just as the volcano was erupting, the North Atlantic jet stream was passing over Iceland from the northwest, carrying myriad sharp-edged particles on a collision course with Europe's air fleets. "It's as if it's jinxed," says Helmut Malewski, who is tracking the ash cloud at Germany's National Meteorological Service's central forecasting office. "The wind blew from the east all winter. But just now, when the volcano goes active, it blows from the northwest." Dryness was another factor. "One strong rainstorm over the North Sea would have washed out the ash and helped us dramatically," Malewski says.
Disrupting the Climate
Still, things could have been a lot worse. In the past, volcanoes have disrupted the Earth's climate again and again. After the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, average global temperatures cooled by half a degree Celsius. Volcanoes are also the suspected culprits behind the mini ice age that occurred during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Despite its might, Eyjafjallajökull hasn't forced its plume high enough for that to happen. Ash from the volcano's plume has reached an altitude of only about 10 kilometers (six miles), not high enough to reach the stratosphere. "So the gas and particles will remain below that in the troposphere and will be carried down to the Earth's surface by rain in the coming days or weeks," says Michael Bittner of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen.
The volcano has also blown less toxic ash and gasses into the air than many of its cousins. Bittner and his team have reviewed images taken by the Eumetsat satellite and concluded that Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull has spewed 2,000 tons of sulphur dioxide into the air. Pinatubo spouted 10,000 times that amount. "Even if it remains active for an extended period of time, it still won't come anywhere close to the scale of Pinatubo," Bitter predicted.
But all that could change if Eyjafjallajökull awakens its larger brothers. The Katla volcano, barely 25 kilometers to the east, has enormously higher explosive power. It also has a rather nasty habit of erupting shortly after Eyjafjallajökull. The last major eruption of Eyjafjallajökull lasted for two years, ending in 1823 when Katla erupted like a massive cannon.
Fire-Spewing Giant
So far, Katla hasn't reacted -- GPS stations haven't registered any movements in its slopes. But there's still another fire-spewing giant in the area -- Heckla. "That volcano erupts, with a regularity that astonishes geologists, every 10 years," says Thomas Walter of the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam. "It is long overdue."
Such chain reactions are not uncommon for volcanic mountain ranges, especially in Iceland. "If one volcano erupts next to a neighboring one where pressure has also built up, then it can give it the decisive kick," says Walter. But he won't venture to predict when the next volcano will erupt.
The dangers posed by volcanoes are significant. In 1989, an ash plume from the Mt. Redoubt volcano caused engine failure in a jumbo jet operated by the Dutch airline KLM over Alaska. The cockpit windows and shell of the 747 were literally sand-blasted. St. Elmo's fire flashed in front of the cockpit glass, glowing ash embers lit up between the engine blades and it smelled of sulfer inside the cabin.
Pilots learn a special procedure for such moments: They continuously ignite the engine to prevent engine failure, begin a descent in order to maintain speed and then turn around. "You go back as quickly as you can to an area where there wasn't any ash," says Lufthansa Captain Jörg Handwerg.
There's good reason, too: The engines are fighting for life. The ash particles melt in the turbine and they can clog the engine's cooling air bores.
Millions at Stake
Still, that kind of horror scenario can only really happen in the heart of an ash plume. Across most of Europe this week, the concentration of ash particles has been low, and the consequences for airplanes would have been much less dramatic. It still would have been costly, though, because even in low concentrations, the particles grind against a jet engine's blades.
"The effect of an ash plume like that on an engine is equivalent to about five years of flight," says Odilo Mühling of German jet engine manufacturer MTU. Airlines that attempt to fly before the cloud has cleared up entirely risk costly repair bills.
For the airlines, it's a torturous numbers game. On the one hand, it can cost an airline more than €10 million per day if it is forced to ground its entire fleet. On the other hand, they also know that it cost over $80 million to overhaul the KLM jumbo jet, which was brand new and had only just gone into service, after it flew through the volcanic ash plume in Alaska.
REPORTED BY DINAH DECKSTEIN, MANFRED DWORSCHAK, MARCO EVERS, CORDULA MEYER, GERALD TRAUFETTER
Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein.
Eyjafjallajökull Chaos Blog
Finnish Air Force Claims Jet Engine Damage
A Finnish Defense Forces still image of damage caused to a Finnish Air Force F-16 fighter jet by the volcanic ash cloud prior to the decision to close the country's airspace on Thursday.
Transit Passengers allowed to leave German Airports
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Frankfurt Airport offers Clean Underwear, Airport Tours and Art Classes
Many of the hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded by the clouds of volcanic ash that have disrupted air travel in Europe for the past few days, have been able to leave the airport and either find alternative accommodation or other ways home. But some have not been so lucky. Around 700 travelers have found themselves trapped in the limbo that is the transit lounge at Frankfurt Airport, Germany's busiest and Europe's third largest airport. Many of them have been in the transit lounge for several days now, with only their hand luggage and unable to access their property.
However Fraport, the company that runs the airport, has tried to make the situation as comfortable as possible. Besides providing obvious essentials, such as meals, and setting up camp beds as well as a communications lounge where mobile phones could be recharged and the Internet could be accessed, this has also included handing out clean underwear and clean T-shirts, that airport staff purchased from local stores.
Instead of displaying flight information the monitors at the various gates are showing television programs in English, Spanish, French and Arabic. The stranded passengers, who are considered to be in neither one country nor another while they are in transit, have been cleared to leave the transit lounges to take a shuttle bus to the airport gym, where they can take a shower and for entertainment, they have also been offered tours of the airport.
Meanwhile children are being catered for with toys and art equipment and craftspeople have been hired to lead kids' workshops where the junior travelers can make things like colored picture frames.
And should the whole situation become too much for anyone, Fraport is also offering passengers the opportunity to talk to members of a crisis intervention team. The airport staff say that most passengers are handling the situation admirably and the crisis team is really only there so that individuals can express emotions, such as anger at missing a wedding or holiday.
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Football Club offers Free Tickets to Stranded Passengers
Help came from an unexpected quarter for passengers who had been left stranded at the Cologne Bonn airport. The local football team, 1 FC Köln, offered them free tickets to the game against Bochum on Friday evening. Passengers simply had to present their ticket for a cancelled Friday flight at the stadium to gain entry. Eventually around 46,000 fans watched the game and the club has yet to report how many of these were stranded travelers. However as a commentator in German business daily, Handelsblatt writes, the offer may have been a dubious one. "As if the (passengers') lives were not hard enough," Christoph Rabe scoffed on Monday's editorial pages. "Football fans already know: FC games are an acquired taste and one enjoyed only by totally dedicated fans. You would only put yourself through this, if you were a hard corps fan."
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Some German Pilots Celebrating Extra Air Space
Not everyone was upset about the disruptions to air traffic caused by the volcanic ash. Over the weekend the glider pilots of Boberg, a town near Hamburg, are one of the few groups celebrating the lack of planes in the sky. Because their town is under a flight path the glider pilots are usually only allowed to fly as high as 750 meters. But on Sunday, the skies were clear as high as 3,000 meters above them. Many of the local glider pilots took advantage of the sunny weather and the lack of air transport to launch. However as they themselves pointed out, the thermals -- warm air coming off the earth that the glider pilots use to rise higher -- only last up to a thousand feet above the ground. To get any higher, gliders need to have motors or be pulled by another aircraft, local flying teacher Holger Weitzel told the Bergedorfer Zeitung. To do that the glider pilot must have undergone their annual air worthiness test. And, as Weitzel pointed out, only two weekends into gliding season, there were not that many glider pilots who had already undergone the testing.
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Finnish Air Force Reports Engine Damage
While many airlines are complaining that European authorities are exaggeratiing the risk to air traffic from volcanic ash in the air, officials have said the engines of fighter jets have been affected by it. Reuters cited a senior US official as saying on Monday that glass build-up was found in an engine of a NATO F-16 fighter plane. Separately, the Finnish Air Force said Boeing F-18 Hornet fighters were affected by ash before the airspace closures last Thursday, the Danish daily Politiken reported .
"A post-landing inspection revealed accumulations of powdery volcanic dust in the aircraft's air intakes. Imagery thus obtained indicated that even a short-duration flight inside an ash cloud may cause substantial damage to aircraft engines," the Finnish Air Force says on its Web site.
The fighters of the Lapland Air Command had been flying training missions over Northern Finland on Thursday morning while airspace was still open to traffic, Politiken reported.
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Social Networking to the Rescue: Twitter Versus the Volcano
Along with government institutions, stranded passengers are harnessing the power of the Internet and related social networking sites. On Facebook users have been noting their disappointment, making jokes and exchanging their own stories on pages like "When Volcanoes Erupt". In Germany, Web sites like Mitfahrzentrale (a site that allows unrelated individuals to share road travel) reported that they were getting around 30 percent more enquiries on their Web site as well as over the phone and via e-mail.
So far, though, the most useful and most widely used seems to be Twitter, which is coming into its own due to the small size and immediacy of its messages. Using tags like #getmehome, #putmeup and #ash tag, the site's users are offering rides, tips and information that might help grounded travelers. Besides asking for co-drivers and passengers -- "Madrid to Calais, car share" is just one example of dozens -- the Twitterers are also posting practical advice. Many Twitter users are keeping the network updated on what they know, in terms of closed airports, cancelled flights and extra ferry crossings.
And it is not only the individual Twitterer using the social networking site. Airlines and airports have been adding links to their regularly updated information and organizations like the US embassy in London, which has, for example, posted a link to a list of medical clinics that may be able to assist with American prescriptions, are also using Twitter.
Of course, not everyone is being that helpful. Twitter users in Germany are also making a fair few jokes at the expense of Iceland and its volcano. "Reykjavik is one of the last airports left open. That's a bit like taking a dump and leaving the room," wrote one joker, while others quipped that: "Stop the press: The Icelanders say they will halt the eruption if Europe forgives their debts." Or: "Heavenly peace this Sunday under the flight path. Thank God for the ash clouds."
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Britain has launched what British media are calling a "Dunkirk-style" relief mission to bring stranded holidaymakers back home. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, fighting an election on May 6, said three warships of Britain's Royal Navy, the HMS Ark Royal, HMS Albion and HMS Ocean, were being mobilized.
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Criticism from International Air Traffic Association
The International Air Traffic Association, IATA, has sharply attacked European authorities over their response to the ash cloud, calling it a "European mess." IATA Director General Giovanni Bisignani told a news conference in Paris on Monday: "We did not focus on figures and facts. Europe was using a theoretical mathematical approach, that is not what we need."
He said test flights carried out by European airlines in the last couple of days showed that in many cases "the concentration of ashes was zero or very limited." There had been no risk assessment, no consultations, no coordination and no leadership in the European Union, Bisignani said. He also complained that it had taken five days for the European Commission to organize a video conference to discuss the problem. European transport ministers were due to discuss the crisis at 1 p.m. GMT on Monday.
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Bus Convoys for German Package Tourists Stuck in Spain
Hanover-based TUI, one of Europe's largest tour operators with its own fleet of planes, has organized "bus convoys" to get stranded holiday-makers on package tours back home.
On Sunday, using TUI planes still active in areas unaffected by flight restrictions, the company flew over 1,000 travelers from several destinations back to airports on the European mainland. Around 540 travelers came from the Spanish island of Mallorca, where around 3,000 were stranded, to Barcelona on the continent. Another group was flown from the Canary Islands in Spain to the Spanish coastal city of Alicante.
All of these measures are costing the company millions. On Monday morning, TUI's travel subsidiary, TUI Travel, reported from London that the stranding of around 100,000 customers had cost the company around £20 million already ($30 million). The company estimated ongoing disruption would cost them between five and six million pounds a day in ongoing costs.
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German Researchers Prepare Test Flight
German Researchers to Conduct Test Flight German scientists plan to conduct a test flight on Monday to gain the first reliable data for the flight ban imposed on German airspace in the wake of ifierce criticism of the ban by major European airlines. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) said an atmospheric research plane will fly to a height of 10,000 meters (32,800 feet) to measure the concentration of volcanic ash particles in the air. The Dassault Falcon 20 jet, staffed with experienced test pilots capable of handling extreme flying conditions, will take off as soon as it gets clearance, and the data it gains will be examined as quickly as possible to help the Germany's air traffic control and the meteorological service to assess the need for continuing the flight ban, a DLR spokesman said.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,689762,00.html
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