In the Dark

I couldn’t resist putting up a quick post about the bizarre circumstances that have seen all airports closed and planes grounded all around Britain,  and the  skies emptied of aircraft.  The eruption of a volcano in a part of Iceland called Eyjafjallajoekull – there will be a pronunciation test at the end – has led to considerable plume of ash being thrown up into the atmosphere. Prevailing winds being roughly south-easterly in direction, part of this cloud has been heading towards mainland Britain.

You can see the cloud as the dark brown and black region on the following satellite image taken early this morning.

Apparently the ash contained in this cloud poses a significant danger to aircraft engines, so the UK Air Traffic Control system decided during the course of today to close UK airspace to all incoming and outgoing flights. Cue travel chaos.

It is anticipated that the ash will affect all of Britain by about 1800 GMT (i.e. 1900 British Summer Time) . It will dissipate as it spreads but of course as long as the eruption continues more ash will be pumped into the air.

One of the events disrupted by this display of vulcanism is the UK National Astronomy Meeting currently taking place in Glasgow. Many UK participants travelled to this meeting by plane and some of them are stuck there now because their return flights are not flying. NAM usually tends to be the sort of thing that senior academics tend to attend for only a day or two because the specialist sessions are quite brief and there are so many other things to do.

Today (Thursday) there was meant to be a Panel meeting organized by the Royal Astronomical Society at which members of the Science and Technology Facilities Council Executive, among others, were supposed to face questions from the assembled throng of astronomers. UK Astronomy has been under a dark threatening cloud for quite a while already, even before the Icelandic volcano did its thing.

However, the panel discussion was drastically curtailed by some not being able to make it to Glasgow and others having to leave early in order to get the train because their planes had been cancelled. In fact, according to what I’ve gleaned from the extensive Twitter traffic (from #NAM2010), John Womersley (Director of Science Programmes at STFC) was basically holding the fort in the absence of the other pundits. He seems to have come in for quite a lot of flak from younger scientists, particularly those whose careers have been wrecked by decisions made by the STFC Executive. I suspect those unable to make it are probably not ungrateful at being presented with an excuse for their absence.

Fellow blogger Andrew Jaffe was commendably prescient in deciding well in advance to return to London from Glasgow by train rather than plane. That’s the kind of  decision many people live to regret given the legendary unreliability of our train network, but this time it certainly paid off.

Not so many Cardiff astronomers went to NAM this year – the reason being that we are back to teaching while most other UK universities are still in their Easter break. However, those Cardiff staff and students who have gone there face more than a few problems getting back!

The meeting is scheduled to end tomorrow but it’s very unclear whether the skies will be open by then. We might have a few cancelled lectures if the situation doesn’t improve quickly…

This entry was posted on April 15, 2010 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Science Politics with tags NAM, Royal Astronomical Society, STFC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.