An ecometric roundup for everyone’s favorite smoke spewing Icelandic volcano.

First off, a map from the New York Times showing the airport closures and ash coverage:

New York Times via FlowingData

You’ll notice that the Icelandic airport remains ironically open.

I’d be remiss if I did not at least briefly cover the climate impacts of the current eruption.  Traditionally, volcanic ash and sulfur, spewed into the upper atmosphere, can have a cooling effect on the earth by reflecting the sun’s rays well before they reach the surface.    You can see this in the “Mount Pinatubo Cooling” period marked in the satellite temperatures map below:

Should we expect the same results from Eyjafjallajokull? Not likely, according to Alan Robock of Rutgers University.

Pinatubo ejected about 20 megatons of material into the stratosphere. Eyjafjallajökull, on the other hand, ejected less than 1 percent of a megaton, …and it all stayed in the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere where we live and where the weather can clean out volcanic material from the atmosphere, bringing it down with rain.

That doesn’t mean this eruption will have NO climate impact. In fact, by grounding most European air travel for days on end, the eruption is having an effect on greenhouse gas emissions.

In this way, Europe is lucky to have a solid train system. If a similar eruption were to affect the United States, we’d be in very serious trouble.

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