There’s likelihood that Antarctica’s volcanoes could significantly disrupt air travel. This is according to a shocking warning that was issued by scientists who claim that this could affect places all over the globe.
It’s been proven by scientists that ash caused by an eruption on Deception Island could disrupt air travel as far away as South America, Australia, and Africa.
One of the geoscientists at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Charles Connor, said: “We have to reassess the potential hazards for global transportation networks posed by even these remote volcanoes.”
There have been approximately 30 eruptions that have been recorded over the last 10,000 years, with the last one being in 1970. Spain and Argentina have scientific research bases on the island, and tourists flock there to admire the world’s largest colony of chinstrap penguins.
A geologist at the Institute of Earth Sciences Jaume Almera in Barcelona, Spain, Adelina Geyer, and her team modeled an eruption on Deception Island by simulating different column heights for volcanic ash at five, 10, and 15 kilometers.
There’s a major concern over ash in the atmosphere because it is a serious problem for aircrafts because it melts inside of engines and gums up fuel lines. It also does not appear on the radar.
The 1989 case of KLM flight 867 is a good example of hundreds of alleged incidents of aircrafts encountering volcanic ash, the flight lost power in all four engines and fell more than 13,000 feet after flying through an ash cloud from Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano.
Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010, its ash clouds forced officials to close airspace across Europe, resulting in billions of dollars in losses. A report was rolled out by scientists who concluded that an eruption on Deception Island would cause ash to be prevalent on a global scale.
Part of Ms Geyer’s team is set to embark on a journey to Deception Island via air and sea to record data that could help improve their model in February 2018. Geyer said that they will be studying recent eruptions “to determine what kind of eruptions we can expect in the future”.
In the meantime, the world has been “slightly lucky” not to have already endured a super eruption, as revealed by Professor Jonathan Rougier who lead the study with Bristol University.
It’s such a huge concern because catastrophic volcanic eruptions, which can cover an entire continent with volcanic ash and block out sunlight for months, bringing on a mini ice age, were thought to take place about every 45,000 to 714,000 years. Fortunately, a new scientific study claims they happen much more frequently at between about 5,200 and 48,000 years.
We are fortunate that the time between super eruptions is way more frequent than previously thought?? I think the un is missing from that statement?