Expert: Iceland's Volcanic Ash Cloud Only Going to Get Worse
April 16, 2010— -- Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull's crater is only a mile and a half wide, but the ripple effect of its massive ash cloud is reverberating worldwide and getting worse, experts said.
"This could potentially be a problem for weeks to even months," Charles Mandeville, a volcanologist at New York's American Museum of Natural History, said.
Officials at Eurocontrol, the European air traffic agency, said that of the 29,000 flights that would normally head through European airspace today, only 12,000 to 13,000 will take place and delays are expected to continue at least into Saturday.
Eurocontrol announced that the airspace in nine countries is "currently not available" as well as airspace around major airports in France, Germany and Poland. According to the Polish press office, the funeral for the country's late president might be delayed.
"This is most significant air traffic control event since Sept. 11, and certainly the most significant that's ever hit all of Europe at one time," Brent Bowen, the head of Purdue University's aviation technology department, said Thursday.
According to ABC News aviation consultant John Nance, the cloud is not a direct threat to domestic U.S. flights but has already had an impact on fleet planning.
"This stuff will go all around the world, but by the time it gets back to the West Coast of the United States, now it's pretty well fallen out to the point where it's not a danger to us," Nance told "Good Morning America" today. "But we've never seen [such a volcanic disruption] on a scale like this where it has hit a tremendous beehive of daily aviation activity."
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It is not yet clear when the flying restrictions will be lifted, but the Eyjafjallajokull volcano is still erupting and could continue spewing ash into the atmosphere for weeks.
"It is likely that the production of ash will continue at a comparable level for some days or weeks," said Einar Kjartansson, a geophysicist at the Icelandic Meteorological Office. "But where it disrupts travel, that depends on the weather."
British media outlets reported Thursday that Eurostar trains between London and Paris and Brussels are sold out.
"You can't get on a train out of England through the Chunnel now to mainland Europe. The ferries are filling up. People are trying to go over to Paris before it gets shut down. Amsterdam is already being affected. Copenhagen is being affected," Bowen said. "This is just having a continuous ripple effect."
