Volcano of the Week #14- Eyjafjallajoekull

While creating a page for the new volcano club zine- 'Love, Lust and Lava' (I'm allowed to plug myself, it's my website) about the volcanoes in the favourite volcano poll (again allowed to plug), I realised that I hadn't featured all of the five volcanoes as volcanoes of the week. As that sentence was ridiculously long it seems to appropriate to write about a volcano with a ridiculously long name- Eyjafjallajoekull. As I'm sure most people know it's Icelandic and therefore amazing. I have been complaining about the bad names of volcanoes recently and I'm slightly disappointed to find out that Eyjafjallajoekull means island-mountain glacier, at least it's accurate. There were fairly large eruptions in 1821 (which was the same year that Napoleon died) but it's probably the 2010 that  is better researched/ more written about on wikipedia.

There was air disruption in Europe during this period and it saw the biggest disruption to air travel since WWII. The eruption created a massive ash cloud that made visibility very low. Volcanic ash clouds also contain small, abrasive fragments of glass; caused by the rapid cooling of particles, which when moving at hight velocity, as ash was moving directly into a jet stream can cause massive problems to plane windscreens. Which is why to some people ash clouds are known as nature's sandblaster (to find this amusing you need to have a knowledge of both volcanoes and glass, so the joke is niche at best). If you do want to read up on this subject more the best place is probably the first volcano club issue- to which there is a link to on the right hand side of the page.

The eruption of Eyjafjallajoekull is often followed by the eruption of a larger and more powerful volcano- Katla, however this hasn't happened yet...