Eyjafjallajokull
The Icelandic volcano whose 2010 ash cloud grounded Europe
In the spring of 2010, a glacier-capped Icelandic volcano with a name that defeated newsreaders worldwide brought European aviation to a standstill. Eyjafjallajokull erupted not with great violence but with a vast plume of fine, glassy ash, lofted high by meltwater interacting with magma and carried by the jet stream across the continent. For a week, fearing engine damage, authorities grounded more than 100,000 flights, stranding millions of travellers and demonstrating just how fragile the modern world remains in the face of a modest volcano in the North Atlantic.
Eyjafjallajokull, whose name means island-mountain glacier, rises to 1,651 metres beneath an ice cap on Iceland's southern coast. Iceland straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart and magma rises to fill the gap, and it also sits atop a mantle hotspot. The 2010 eruption began quietly in March with fissures of lava, then shifted beneath the glacier in April, where contact between magma and ice produced violent steam explosions that shattered the lava into fine ash. The eruption was small by Icelandic standards, yet its ash was unusually fine-grained and abrasive, exactly the hazard that jet engines cannot tolerate.
The eruption was a sharp lesson in the interconnected vulnerabilities of a globalised economy, costing airlines billions and prompting a wholesale rethink of how aviation responds to volcanic ash. It also drew uneasy attention to Eyjafjallajokull's larger neighbour Katla, historically a far more dangerous volcano whose eruptions have often followed those of its smaller sibling. For Iceland, long accustomed to living atop a geological seam, the episode was both a reminder of the island's restless foundations and an unexpected boost to a tourism industry built on fire and ice.