Volcanic Eyjafjallajökull dirt-splurt space snap The ESA has released this pic of the Icelandic volcano plume currently paralyzing air traffic above northern Europe and Britain. The pic was snapped yesterday by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer instrument aboard the Envisat spacecraft, before the plume had spread to cover the southern UK. Envisat image of the …
I would like to express my appreciation to the editor that wrote that headline and subhead. That was some goddam brilliant writing.
Headline writing is an art, and this example is a masterpiece. Its punchiness and general waggishness might even exceed my all-time favorite headline, "Lax Styx Wax Clicks." I would memorize this so I could cite it as a paradigm of headline writing, if I thought I could memorize "Eyjafjallaokull."
Relax. Whilst there were a number of short periods when it erupted violently producing a lot of ash; most of the time Eyjafjallajökull just grumbled away.
On a media hype scale, this might be huge; but the eruption is much smaller than Mount St. Helens. It's just better placed for maximum buggeration in the current weather patterns.
No reduction in aircraft noise around here, unfortunately. The sky is still full of the usual annoying low-flying helicopters and other light aircraft doing aerobatics, etc.
I keep hoping their engines will seize up, but no luck so far. Infernal combustion jobs, presumably. Must be immune to ash.
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I was under the impression that Iceland straddles both Europe and North America, hence the ridiculous amounts of seismic and volcanic activity to be found there.
Unless you mean Iceland, the purveyor of piss-poor frozen foods? If my mum went to Iceland, I'd get her labotomised.
OK, so Iceland couldn't muster a naval force during the cod wars to defeat the mighty Royal Navy, so they thought, lets just wait a couple of years then nick all their money and drop several thousand tonnes of ash on them. They won't expect that.
I always wondered why a country so near, so unthreatening and with so much in common was a sort of enemy. Now I know why! I would suggest dropping a nuke on them, but the fallout would apparently just blow back to us.
Yea, we couldn't "muster" a naval force to match an "enemy" who's navy represents ~13% of the entire Icelandic population, backed by a military force that represents ~60% of the population... Surprising, ain't it? (Which makes the fact that we essentially "won" the "wars" that more impressive. - Brute force isn't always the answer :P)
And yes, we all came together and decided to purposefully collapsed our economy and *cause* a volcanic eruption, to do minor damage to the UK economy and delay a few airplanes. - (... just for the lulz xD)
/facepalm
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