Great news! When it blows, the ash should shade the planet and buy us a few years to prevent the global-warming Gorepocalypse. Who cares about the billions in potential economic damage to humans?
Experts are warning that an eruption could be imminent at an even more powerful Icelandic volcano than the one that paralysed air traffic last year.
Seismologists are nervously watching rumblings beneath Katla which could spew an ash cloud dwarfing the 2010 eruption that cost airlines two billion dollars (£1.27 billion) and drove home how vulnerable modern society is to the whims of nature.
Brooding over rugged moss-covered hills on Iceland’s southern edge, Katla is a much bigger beast than the nearby Eyjafjallajokul volcano, which blasted ash all over Europe for several weeks in an eruption that local scientist Pall Einarsson describes nonetheless as “small”.
Named after an evil troll, Katla has a larger magma chamber than Eyjafjallajokul’s.
Its last major eruption in 1918 continued more than a month, turning day into night, starving crops of sunlight and killing off some livestock.
The eruption melted some of the ice-sheet covering Katla, flooding surrounding farmlands with a torrent of water that some accounts have said measured as wide as the Amazon.
Now, clusters of small earthquakes are being detected around Katla, which means an eruption could be imminent, seismologists say. The earthquakes have been growing in strength, too.
After a long period of magnitude three tremors, a magnitude four quake was detected last week.
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